


Shoeless Joe and the Sunshine Kid

by nimmieamee



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon Characters Death(s), Dark, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Psychological Horror, Rape/Non-con Elements, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-06
Updated: 2014-10-06
Packaged: 2018-02-20 04:18:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2414678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/nimmieamee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Bucky was sufficiently recovered, he and Steve took a trip. They saw the baseball hall of fame. They saw a clear blue lake. They saw the countryside, with clumps of trees in many colors.<br/>(Something about this is a lie.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shoeless Joe and the Sunshine Kid

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Босоногий Джо и солнечный мальчишка](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6513712) by [superstition](https://archiveofourown.org/users/superstition/pseuds/superstition), [Taytao](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taytao/pseuds/Taytao)



> If you have things that trigger or upset you, then please take a look at the tags. The tags are quite spoilery, but I have them there to avoid disturbing people who do not want to be disturbed.

When Bucky was sufficiently recovered they took a trip. 

Steve was different; Bucky was still getting used to him. He was by turns more solemn and more energized than the person Bucky could remember. But Bucky didn't know what this new Steve was supposed to act like. He could barely remember what this new Steve was supposed to look like. He only had fragments to link him to: a tense and bony knee, a stubborn chin. That was the Steve he understood. While this Steve he knew mainly from pictures, filmreels. He'd forgotten too much. Only a sliver of recognition remained.  

Still, when Bucky thought of Steve it was with an overriding sense of rightness.

It was like the cars on the road. They were all wrong now, they looked less graceful somehow, the shabby curves of them were all gone. But of course the more he looked at the new sleek models falling behind them on the highway, the more he realized they seemed right. He couldn't trust his first impulse, which was to find them strange, to dislike them. Because he got used to them very quickly and then the recognition came. He knew these cars, too. So too with Steve. 

"This is for work," Steve said, sounding regretful.  

Steve was always working. His work was sometimes Bucky. Sometimes not; sometimes it was the world. He had an easy, apologetic manner about it either way. When he came to collect Bucky from the doctors he always took note of how sorry Bucky was, how enraged some days, furious to be such a burden and humiliated to be a burden to  _Steve_. But Steve never made a thing of it. In fact he was twice as sorry as Bucky was. The nation often took his attention away: dustups in foreign spheres, the detention of enemy aliens. He was bitterly sorry about it.

"I can barely remember the last time I even saw you," he'd say. 

Bucky would count it back in his head; he was supposed to do this; they said it would help him. He'd say something like, "Two weeks."

Steve would suck in his breath very fast through his teeth, a kind of hiss, which Bucky couldn't remember him doing much before. But then before he'd never had so many responsibilities; he hadn't needed this, this action like a valve letting off steam. "I owe you better than this," Steve would say, shaking his head. 

Steve wanted to be there for Bucky and world both. But what were the doctors for? 

"Fujiyama," Bucky would say. This wasn't quite right. He couldn't remember where he got it. And he wasn't using it right. But Steve would get it, because this was Steve. Fujiyama. Fujiyama. Fujiyama. Fuck You Jack, I'm Alright. 

And Steve always laughed, a little thrown off. But this time he'd been thrown off and delighted. And he'd announced the trip. And said, pensively, "I forgot how funny you were." His eyes had looked very blue. Bucky now had the eerie feeling that time and the serum had somehow increased the colors of Steve: pale dun brown-blond had erupted into gold like the leaves on the trees, the washed-out eyes had taken on the blue of the sky and the creeks under the bridges: the whole nation outside the car had been transmuted into a person. But he put this thought out of his mind. It was strange. 

Steve had said again, "I forgot you were funny. I did. I knew it, but I still forgot, you know?"

Then, almost like he understood, "You ever get that?"

Yes. 

So Steve understood him. Of course. Of course he did. This Steve was almost superhuman in his understanding, his goodness. He spoke to the doctors. He came by when he could. He took Bucky on trips. 

"You don't have to meet with anyone there if you don't want to," he said. "Actually you shouldn't. Don't. The doctors said--"

He really wasn't supposed to be meeting other people. He wasn't ready yet. It was forbidden. But people couldn't seem to say no to new Steve; it just didn't happen. So even if Bucky couldn't talk to anyone else, here he was in the sleek black car winding down the farm roads, watching the mountains falling back sharply into green and red and gold below him, the small village clusters built along the road, the rushing blue Susquehanna under the covered bridges. 

"Have we been here before?" Bucky said, after a while. 

"No," Steve said. "But you'll like it."

"I'll hold you to that," Bucky said. 

Steve rolled his eyes a little and looked at Bucky sideways. This seemed so natural on him. Some days Bucky couldn't tell what Steve had naturally and what he put on for Bucky's sake. 

But all Steve said was, "It's supposed to be nice this time of year. Before winter hits."  

-

The town was at the foot of a long lake, an unnaturally blue lake. The lake had an Indian name and an Indian burial ground nearby; this was what the map Steve had picked up at the gas station said. But the girl shopping at the general store, who had beads in her long fair hair, corrected Steve and said it was a Native American name and a Native American burial ground. She said this very significantly and a little menacingly. Bucky, standing back where she couldn't see him, wanted to defend Steve, but Steve only told her, "So it is," with a smile. He didn't need defending. 

There was a general store, a school, a restaurant, a mason's lodge, a movie theater, a bank, a gas station, a post office, a local museum, a police station, and seven churches. Main street was five blocks long. At one end stood the burial ground (for Natives only; the cemetery was three miles out of town and had American flags on most of the graves; they'd passed it on the way), and then just behind it a very tall mountain speckled green, red, and gold. And at the other end of the street was the railroad line and a road to go around the lake, and then another tall mountain, this one mostly red, some gold, a little green. 

The houses came just before and just after Main Street. The ones leading down to the lake were the best ones. On the other side it was all dilapidated Victorians or else here and there a low modern house built for a low modern price. But the two or so streets below the waterfront had ancient colonial brick and simple colored glass above the doors, and there were small plaques in front with stories of settlement or quotes from famous local writers. A huge brick building stood to one end: a girls' boarding school. Across the lake, to one side, there was an even larger mansion. This was owned by the same people who owned the lake, and the town, and the school, and the road, and the railroad. But possibly not the Native American burial ground. 

Bucky didn't really understand what they were supposed to do here.

Work. Steve was working. Out in this place he had three allies: first, the spy Bucky wasn't supposed to talk to (and didn't want to talk to); second, his black friend (not a  _Negro_ , said the echo of the beads girl in Bucky's head, just  _black_ ); third, Stark, the heir to this vast lake and tiny town, who wasn't interested in either and probably wouldn't even show.

"Not really the Stark you remember," Steve told him as they got back into the car.

"I know," Bucky said. They'd covered that. And he didn't really remember the Stark he was supposed to remember anyway. And he had no idea why any of these people were here. He only knew that it was fine for him to be here even as they worked, because the doctors had said so. 

"So I just avoid them?" Bucky said.

"Yeah. You just relax," Steve said. "You're here to relax, Bucky. That's the aim of the game. They're staying at Stark's place anyway."

"And we're not?" Bucky said. 

He shouldn't have bothered asking. In no time at all they'd driven the two blocks down to the lake, where there was a small green house set into a flat green park leading up to the pier. The plaque in front had the name of the man who'd built the house, and when, and described how thoroughly he'd settled the place. Thoroughly. Very thoroughly. The house was the only house on this side of the street. To get beyond the fence on any side would put Bucky in the park. Anyone could see him; he'd only be able to leave under cover of darkness, and then there were other variables: if people in the houses across the way owned dogs, or if at night there came boats with floodlights, or--

"Relax," Steve said again, putting a hand on his shoulder.

He was supposed to like it when Steve did this. He did. He supposed he did. Steve had his hand on the right shoulder anyhow, not the flesh shoulder, but the starter shoulder, the one he couldn't even feel. It was good that he couldn't feel it, according to the doctors, because then they could work up to really touching him; they would start with these dead parts of him, gently prodding the circuits, and then over time they would get to the flesh parts of him.

Bucky was shifting all over, like the canopy of trees on the mountain. Steve's hand was on the dead and dying section: this was symbolized, Bucky thought, by the gold and the red. And then someday Bucky would let him touch again the living green parts of him. This was the theory anyway. 

He wanted to want this -- wanted to want Steve wanting him now. But the hand on his shoulder felt heavy. Clunky, he thought. It was a nice long-fingered hand and it still felt that way. 

No. No. He couldn't feel anything at all on that shoulder. That was the problem. 

"C'mon," Steve said. "We'll unpack, and then you can rest. I have to head out. Be sure to be waiting when I come back. We can see about getting tickets for the museum."

Did he even want to go to the museum? 

Steve must have seen hesitation on his face. He said, "Remember? The museum's been around since our time."

He didn't remember. 

-

Steve was always remembering things. The whole of their collective memory was lodged in Steve. Remember you used to take care of me, Bucky? Remember that time I was sick and you practically carried me to the doctor? Remember I always relied on you? 

Once, without even thinking about it, Bucky had blurted out, "Didn't think you'd want to remember anything like that, you were always so sore about being sick and needing help." 

He'd had a kind of half-baked creeping sensation: the memory of an irritable retort in a street somewhere, a vague sense of always coming up against some implacable sense of pride. 

But he'd known this was the wrong thing to say right away. 

Steve had not become irritable. Perfect people could not be irritated. Instead he'd looked wryly at Bucky, not without kindness, and said, "Maybe I learned some humility, Bucky."

Maybe. Maybe. Now he wanted Bucky waiting when he got back. Got back from what? When? He hadn't said. Was this revenge? Bucky tried to think of the picture Steve painted -- him coughing away, miserable and sick, and Bucky out earning everything. Had Bucky been condescending about it? Was this just payback? 

But it was so strange. 

You did everything for me, Bucky. 

This was unnatural. Doing  _everything_  for someone. What could Bucky remember? Not much, but mostly a deep sense that he'd done plenty for himself, too. 

He couldn't wait. He couldn't. Steve must be across the lake in the Stark mansion and from the window Bucky had a view of all the boats across the tiny park, and Steve was not on any of them. He'd taken the winding road around the lake. This ate up some time. And it was growing dark. Shortest distance across the park was a straight shot south to the houses across the way, from there twenty meters to Main Street. 

Relax, Buck. You can do it. 

He knew by looking at the fading light over one mountain and the image of a thin yellow moon becoming visible over the other -- full darkness in twenty minutes. So it was. Full darkness. No lights in this town except for in the upstairs bedroom of a house across the street, in two rooms up at the boarding school, in the prow of a small boat still out on the water. So outside the house and beyond the fence the blackness was very complete, autumn blackness, so dark he couldn't even see the dry leaves underfoot as they crackled faintly. 

He went to Main Street. There were lights above the bank and lights coming down the road. A schoolbus. The windows full of sleeping children's heads all garlanded with boyscout ties around the necks. And the front of the restaurant was lit, and so was a small alcove next to the museum entrance. There was something large and black there with white lettering, like a scoreboard or something, only for what Bucky couldn't tell. There was no game anywhere. Only the empty little street. He thought about going beyond Main Street but it seemed pointless. There was nothing beyond this but the cemetery and the Victorian houses and then nearly two hundred miles of corn fields and dark roads and small towns laid out to serve the highway. So it was nothing on one side and then on the others two mountains and a lake: the whole town was laid out like a trap. 

Something caught his eye on the scoreboard. Red white blue. A cane, a top hat. He knew the symbol without having to think about it; it simply called up a kind of instinctive nausea. Nausea, annoyance, resentment. 

"Fifth place," he muttered, when he'd crossed the street for a closer look. "Good."

But then the flash of blue and white that caught his eye wasn't so good.

"Los Angeles?" he said. "What the  _fuck_?"

-

So this was how things stood. Steve hadn't told him. Bucky hadn't waited like he was supposed to -- like Steve had effectively ordered him to -- but then Steve hadn't  _told_  him. 

Los Angeles. What a bum town. Bucky saw burning towns in his mind's eye now, he saw all kinds of places all over the world, bamboo towns and towns where the walls were ancient and crenellated, and he saw them burning up. These, he thought (though the doctors discouraged this or any kind of thinking like this or any kind of creative thinking, really), these were Los Angeles. 

He had the distinct feeling that Los Angeles had never done anything to him before. But that didn't matter; Los Angeles felt all wrong. 

So did that word Steve had used: museum. That was not a museum. That was the Hall of Fame, a hokey place, a new place. Or it had been a new place. Now it was old. Even the names were old now. Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Honus Wagner, Babe Ruth. No one from the Negro League, imagine them up there with Ty Cobb. But floating around in his head there was a voice that spoke rapid-fire French and then broke off, annoyed, and butted into his conversation and said, "The Dodgers? But did you ever hear of the Newark Eagles? The Kansas City Monarchs?"

No and no. He hadn't known. He'd only known vaguely that there was another league out there, with teams that came and died, falling into obscurity, no permanence to them; they were not totally American, they wouldn't last forever. They were the Negro League, a strange mirror of the American and National Leagues, that was all. They couldn't possibly have been as good as the real thing, as mythic, as perfect. They were just the League that existed in the shadows.

But now he skulked around the shadows, and couldn't seem to hold onto anything. Steve slipped out of his head, so did the war and the Dodgers, so did the great devotion Steve talked about, the power to do  _everything_  for someone. 

"You didn't tell me it was the Hall of Fame," he told Steve over breakfast the next day.

The radio was playing a song. It Ain't Me, It Ain't Me.

"I'm sorry?" Steve said.

"You called it a museum," Bucky said, almost accusatorially. "It's the Hall of Fame. That's what everyone called it. We talked about it for weeks; you got sore because-- because somebody--" he couldn't remember who just then, "--said there was no way Hack Wilson would ever make it in."

Steve raised an eyebrow. And after a minute a flush like relief came over his pale face, flooding his wonderful American features, a pink deluge all the way from his sculpted gold brows down to his perfectly-formed mouth. He said, "You know, I didn't think you'd remembered?"

So there it was. Conscientious Steve, not wanting to press or pry. He outlined how much he hadn't wanted to press or pry. How careful he wanted to be. How good. Steve was a good person. The very best.

He'd still neglected to mention the Dodgers leaving for Los Angeles.  

When he left, Bucky was supposed to sit upstairs in the balcony, where everyone could see him, and contemplate the lake or something, the changing colors on the mountainside, the park, the whole relaxing vista. 

This is a fucking waste of time, said the Frenchman in his head, and how Bucky understood him he couldn't say, but he did understand.

"You're telling me," said Gabe, who was a Negro, and then he broke off because Steve had mentioned Howie Schultz, and Gabe said in response, "You a fan of the Dodgers? But did you ever hear of the Newark Eagles? The Kansas City Monarchs? The New York Cubans? Miss Effa Manley, who owned the Negro Dodgers?"

Did they even know there were Negro Dodgers, was the underlying question.

"That's the team that had Willie Wells, I think," Jim had said out of nowhere.

"Oh," Steve had said, understanding dawning. "Right. Right. The team with the Million Dollar Infield."

Well, how could he know that but get the Hall of Fame wrong?

So Bucky didn't stay on the balcony, well in sight. He crept along by the edge of the lake behind the fading and dying trees, all brown and gold. He went as far as the girl's school, which was as far as he had cover. The girls were coming out between classes. Most of them wore green pinafores and saddle shoes, but some wore jeans and colorful smocks and cowboy boots. Their hair was very long, much longer than Bucky thought it ought to be, sometimes center-parted and running all down their backs in shining waves. A cream-colored car, expensive looking, slowly pulled down the road to the school and stopped and out stepped some people Bucky could not make out. The car had come from the direction of the mansion. Bucky couldn't make sense of it. Possibly the road that way led up to Canada or something. Here were Canadians.

This was one way to get out of the town. Up to Canada. What was in Canada? Who cared. It wasn't the town.

He didn't know why, but the more Steve said the town was good for him, the more Bucky hated it.

-

But, just in case the people in the car weren't from Canada, he resolved to go to the mansion.

He wasn't supposed to know what Steve did and he wasn't supposed to involve himself in it, because it wasn't good for him. All the doctors agreed that it wasn't good for him. Specialists from all over the world were united in this. Bucky had the half-baked notion that Steve talked about him to everyone -- to his spy friend, his black friend, his Stark friend, all ten million new friends Steve seemed to have. And they'd all told Steve the same thing: Steve's business was all the messy business of the world, and it was too messy for Bucky. 

Bucky was supposed to sit and watch the leaves changing on the trees or something.

Well he didn't want to. He was no longer Devoted Bucky, he was now a less mythic, less wonderful Bucky. He was Fuck You Jack Fujiyama Bucky. He was going to the mansion. 

He wouldn't take the road near the girls' school. Anyone could see him. Steve would see him coming. Instead Bucky went to the other side of the lake and found a trail leading from the burial ground all along edge of the water. When he followed it up to where the lake began he could see it winking out behind the foliage and then reappearing here and there, nearly hidden, all around the rim. It would take him to the mansion, or close enough. It was just a dirt path and a longer journey than taking the road, but people must take it sometimes because there were recent tire tracks on it.

He set out the next day. Steve was gone again, had appeared downstairs in a crisp white shirt and blue tie. Bucky had awoken with questions; he always had questions, even though he wasn't supposed to have questions, wasn't supposed to demand answers, was just supposed to wait for them to arrive. But he'd wanted to know what he'd done. Before 

"What you did?" Steve had said, blinking. His wholesome blue eyes looked down at Bucky, half-amused, half-worried. "You changed my life, that's what. Bucky, everything I am... I have to give you credit for it. For looking out for me. Protecting me. Always. In a way, Captain America deserves to be forgotten. It should be you, Bucky. You. The real hero for this country. I mean, what am I? A shield. Defense. But you know who really embodies what that means? You."

This was supposed to anchor Bucky. It did. It did. Every time. It always washed over him, it was like the breeze running through the trees outside and shaking out all the leaves and leaving the park nicely settled. Steve spoke, away went the doubts; they fell to the ground, and Bucky relaxed. Steve had the magic words to do this. You're the real hero, Buck. You.

Beautiful. What a beautiful thing to say.

"I meant for a job," Bucky said flatly. "What did I do as a job?"

Steve blinked at him. "Oh, you worked here and there," he said. "It was difficult times, Bucky. People did whatever they could. WPA. Sweeping jobs, loading jobs, jobs at the docks, jobs in the muck."

This was not an answer. Bucky imagined that people told Steve not to answer, never to give a straight answer. Because he couldn't force it. Bucky was only allowed to remember what he could come up with himself. 

Steve must have sensed Bucky's frustration because after a minute he said, very carefully, "Honestly, Bucky, I was so sick and grateful that I never asked. How could I have pestered you about it?"

But now, as Bucky made his way down the dirt path, stepping over gnarled roots here and there, he could hear Steve asking. The old Steve. Where are you going? very interestedly. No boundaries, no sense of propriety, no stiff Anglo-Scotch sense of reservation. Who believed in this kind of thing? Bucky didn't know. A Buchanan somewhere, maybe. But Steve had no Buchanan-ness. Just a kind of neighborhood busybody-ness to him, the manner of a child raised maybe by the crotchety, filthy, rude spirit of the Gowanus. Where are you going? Where are you going?

Ha! Just try asking him that question  _back_. He might puff up right away, all five foot pathetic of him. 

But he'd answer. This new Steve wouldn't answer. He wouldn't take offense, wouldn't say Bucky was being a babysitter. But he wouldn't answer, either.

Buck, where are you going? 

Along this side of the lake, the long way, along the shadow road beneath the morning cloud mist, where everything was cold and the red and gold leaves fell all around, slimy to the touch but still crackling underfoot. The trees on this end -- dense and overpowering. But when he looked across the lake at the opposite shore it seemed the wood was no great obstacle. Just an ugly mottled carpet someone had thrown on the far mountain. Clumps of broccoli trees. Trees like the shag rug in the green house, looking for all the world like a giant's foot would sink right into them.

Halfway to the mansion he came across the source of the tire tracks. It was the schoolbus, Philadelphia Public number 75, with black and Puerto Rican boys of maybe twelve or fifteen or eighteen years of age spilling out of it, their skinny white counselor yelling at them. This was for their  _benefit_ , this country air. This was a chance to see the woods. They weren't interested in the woods. Splitting off from the path there was a small trail down to a red-roofed tower by the water. A placard nailed to a tree said it was the work of Abner Stark, 1832. They wanted to see the work of Abner Stark, 1832. They wanted to run along the small beach.

"You can't  _graffiti_  it," snapped the counselor.

"You'd better watch them," said an even skinnier youth, dark-skinned, looking to be about the oldest of the bunch, who was sitting on the bottom step of the bus exit.

"You think so?" said the counselor anxiously.

"Yeah, sand graffiti," said the boy sarcastically. "It's a whole new thing. Better keep your eyes peeled."

"Oh god," said the counselor, and he was off to the beach, which meant that Bucky only had to sneak past the boy, which was easy enough.

These were the only people he encountered. And the trip itself was uneventful. Eleven miles. Bucky cleared it in less than two hours. He supposed this was strange. But he no longer had anything to measure strange by. The heat of the day maybe. It began very cold and became overpoweringly hot in a manner of hours. This meant that his arm bothered him. He stopped briefly, twice, to let it cool. And once to watch the way it lit up under the sun in places. 

-

The spy was up there, Bucky knew, and she was very close to Steve and she made Bucky uneasy. It was not because people should not be close to spies. Although people should not be. The Buchanan-ness inside Bucky rebelled at the notion. 

Red, Bucky called her. Thought of her as. Red. Warning! Danger! Red.

The times Bucky had met her she'd had a kind of hidden power. The power of instilling authority. The power of  _distance_. She might seem chatty sometimes but really she was distant. For Bucky she'd always reserved a near godlike indifference. It seemed to Bucky that he might do anything in the world -- kill her friends, snatch Steve away, shoot her in the gut -- and still she would act like it didn't matter a bit. But no person could be so removed. But she was. And so Bucky was really beneath her, a low creature, someone who maybe she might pretend not to know.

And, since he knew nobody these days except for Steve, the thought of being passed over like this did not sit well, and so when Bucky thought of Steve's spy it was never kind thoughts, but horrible thoughts.

So say you slip a knife into a woman's guts, well if you get it in a certain angle, you may see things, which, scientifically, are not to be found in a man's guts. You might uncover fetal stages of development and so on. Maybe. Very edifying. This is for your benefit. Fresh country air and the woods and these little thoughts. 

The things the doctors say don't think of.

Anyway, he knew Red was up at the mansion. He had only to wait for her silhouette to appear, and when he was crouched in the dirty leaves beyond the lawn it did. She was leaning against a desk. She would be aware that she could be seen through the window, but she was still doing this, insouciant. A man hurried into the room, blocked by the curtains, and Bucky couldn't tell who it was. Then in came a woman. Then Steve's silhouette. And by the hand Steve had a little boy and teenage girl, and from here Bucky could tell the girl was wearing a kind of pinafore.

How was this work?

Red straightened and passed to the double doors and out she came -- yes, this was her; the hair was different, but it was her -- and she beckoned to the boy and the girl. She said, "Oh, come here. Let me show you something. This is a game for children."

The boy had black hair and light eyes; the girl was the same beads girl from the general store, tan-skinned and fair-haired. They came out. The second woman followed them; she was slim and dark and Bucky's inner Buchanan said perhaps a Latin type, but the echo of this beads girl turned up her nose at the phrasing, so he had to wonder what they were calling the Latin types now. 

Red bent over. She was showing them something in her hands that had them laughing. Some servants came with drinks -- he knew they were servants because they weren't so trim and fit and they had the look of the cashiers and sweeping storefront owners of Main Street -- and then Red straightened and her whole demeanor changed. Now she was not so friendly. The second woman was murmuring, "Wonderful, wonderful, thank you so much," in a kind of accent, but Red only said, "Yes, and now to talk," in a hard voice. And at the door waiting for her were Steve and the man Bucky hadn't been able to see behind the curtains. Steve had said his friend up here was black. But this man was not black. He had a blondish combover and a skinny kind of suit on.

They vanished inside, leaving the other woman with the children.

And they didn't close the curtains or anything, so, for as far as Bucky could see, they  _did_  talk. That was it. That was all. For hours. The sun crossed over from one mountain to the other. The girl in the pinafore became bored and sat down in a pile of leaves and the little boy ran in circles around her. But inside they only talked, not even very animatedly. Everyone was calm and friendly and boring. Like it was chit chat. That was all.

This wasn't  _work_. 

Steve's work wasn't supposed to be anything like this. 

-

But then what did he expect Steve to do up here, he thought later. 

There were no Nazis here. There were no secret bases. There was only the lake and the mountains and this little park and that dull as dirt street, and the town's one claim to notoriety: the Baseball Hall of Fame. But probably no worthwhile baseball teams for miles, though maybe a Negro League team, though he had to assume that now they called them the Black League, which sounded sinister but wasn't, really. 

Steve wasn't back until it was dark. He was never back until it was dark, though he always appeared looking entirely refreshed, not at all tired. No wonder. He didn't even do anything all day. 

Except that something had hit Bucky on the way back, as he was edging around the Philadelphia Public number 75 campsite. 

"Well, I got it," said the half-forgotten Steve, the one in Bucky's mind. "But they kept me in there all day. You're lucky you don't need to do it. Buck; you should've seen it. They asked me so many questions about my being sick, I think I nearly got sick again from exhaustion. Talking all day. But I got it."

And then there'd come a green paper card, which said things on it like  _cafeteria worker_  and  _artist_  and  _WPA_  and  _Steven_.

"You worked for the WPA," Bucky said, when Steve came through the door. "You said  _I_  did, but--"

"Everyone did," Steve said easily. "A sign of the times." Again he put his hand on Bucky's shoulder, and again he said, warmly, "I didn't think you'd remember." 

Then, lightly, pensively: "Your arm is hot."

Steve went into the living room and switched on the radio. It was playing the same song it had been playing before. Some Folks Inherit Star-Spangled Eyes.

"I have such a love-hate relationship with this song," Steve called over his shoulder. 

Then: "I really believe in defending this country, you know. I really believe in it."

-

He couldn't explain why he had this -- this  _rage_  he had for Steve. It wasn't Steve's fault. Steve did everything the doctors said to do. He never overstepped. He was never cruel. He made room for Bucky; he could have come up here to do his strange chatty work without babysitting Bucky at the same time. Doing both had to be a real pain in the neck, but Steve never let on.

He was so  _good_. 

Why couldn't Bucky remember him that way? Why couldn't Bucky remember anything about the life Steve sketched out?

The problem was that Bucky's memories were not at all reliable. They'd been thoroughly tampered with, the doctors said. So Bucky could not trust himself. Already he could see he was mostly impulse. Steve had a rhythmic, predictable beat to him. He woke, he went to work, he came back at the same time. But Bucky roved all over the tiny town, desperate to go against Steve's order to stay in, to relax. It made no sense. Why shouldn't he want to relax?

No, he couldn't trust himself. He'd be better off trusting Steve. Bucky's mind was all wrong.

Still, he had a few memories that seemed very real, so real and so recurring that he couldn't help but trust in them. One was of a woman with chestnut hair sitting at a dingy table and talking to a man with deep-set eyes. He thought these might be his parents. They  _felt_  like his parents, like how the little girls he saw sometimes felt like family. But he never brought this up with anyone because he was supposed to remember on his own, and yet he had the sinking feeling that if he came clean about what he remembered people wouldn't like it. They wouldn't like it. His life before now ought to be impermanent, people thought. Whatever Steve said about the person he'd been, the thing he'd  _become_  -- and he had a hard time owning up to even the thought of it -- it ought to slip away out of time, nothing heroic, nothing special, just an ugly footnote in history.

He had only a few rock solid memories of Steve. And a lot of filler stuff, grey thoughts he'd dredged up to link these pieces together. They ran... they ran like this:

So first he thought it had been dark and they'd been outside, but it wasn't the clean outside of this place, tinged with some wood smell Bucky couldn't recognize. It had been a kind of sour and grey outside with all these buildings pressed in close together, and maybe he'd had a cold or something.  _Him_. Not Steve. Or maybe Steve too; he didn't know. The point was: this whole story of Steve always being the sick one, it couldn't be entirely correct. Bucky had filled in the memory a little and in these fill-in parts he got sick too, sometimes.

He did remember that he'd been avoiding Steve for a week. It hadn't been a bad illness, but he'd thought, what the hell, imagine he gets it, I'm out for a week but he'll be out for months; that's how he is. 

So for a week he'd thought of Steve but not seen him. For some reason he thought this had been going on since they'd gone to a party that someone -- he didn't have the name -- had invited them to in a parlor somewhere, just a rowdy bunch of people singing and banging away at a piano, not much of a gas, really. And Steve hadn't even stayed by his side long. There'd been a sort of ratty looking guy, Bucky thought, with a pointed face but not dressed half-bad, who seemed to know Steve. And after they'd exchanged some words over something that Bucky couldn't remember, or more likely he hadn't even been listening, Steve had gone off with the rat-faced guy.

And after that Bucky didn't see him. He couldn't recall that they'd telephoned much in those days. He filled this part in for himself: they'd had a system, a way of talking to someone over there and another person over here, passing on information through neighbors and friends, that kind of thing. Why not? Living like that made sense to Bucky. But Bucky hadn't passed on anything for a week, fearing that he'd end up passing on more than Steve could take. 

Until one day he turned the corner in that oppressive grey street and there was Steve, and he couldn't place what Steve had been doing, but he remembered the way Steve looked from the back, in that ugly oversized coat of his. And he remembered feeling relief, because he hadn't known it or really thought about it, but he'd missed Steve. 

He must have said something like, "Hello."

Steve didn't say hello back. Instead he'd come right out and asked why Bucky was avoiding him, and Bucky knew he hadn't mentioned the illness in response, but couldn't say why he hadn't mentioned it. Maybe Steve had hated discussing how he might get seriously sick, so sick he wouldn't be any use to people. Bucky felt that this older, skinnier, long-gone Steve would have hated that: being no use on his own, being sick all the time, needing too much help. Not like the now Steve, who couldn't seem to shut up about all the Good Old Sicknesses Bucky had nursed him through.

Bucky didn't remember nursing anybody. He remembered being tired of even talking about illness; Steve never fell into these periods of immense gratitude over it, not back then anyway; and anyway it wasn't like Bucky wanted him to, or wanted him to think he was so fragile and beholden. So he hadn't said he was sick or anything, just denied avoiding Steve, and Steve had said--

And this was such a strange thing to remember--

"It's because you saw me leave with Abel, isn't it?"

That was one remark Bucky had one hundred percent recollection of. This stupid, offhand remark during some embarrassing fight in the middle of the street. You Saw Me Leave With Abel.

Who was Abel? He had no idea. He might have been the rat-faced man at the party, only Bucky couldn't be sure he hadn't thought the party up in order to make sense of Steve saying this. Abel was lost to the mists of time. And mostly the remark about Abel had left Bucky with a sense of confusion. This was really why he remembered this moment. Confusion. Nowadays he was always confused; he understood confusion, confusion was constant, so it made sense that he remembered not so much of his ma or his pa or his job, but more his confusion. 

Somehow -- Bucky did not know how -- they'd ended up arguing their way inside, and Steve had been all tensed up and fierce. Abel, he kept saying. Like this was important. 

"I won't lie to you about this." 

That had been another fragment Bucky remembered very clearly.

"Look, maybe I'm sick in a lot of ways, Buck. Maybe I am. But--"

No, I'm sick, for chrissake, that's why I've been avoiding you. The only thing really wrong with you is the same thing that's always been wrong with you, which is that you're crazy, and somehow when God was making you He swapped out the common sense; if you wanna leave with somebody you go ahead. What's that got to do with it? You keep a roadmap of the local bums like they're your friends and I never say a word about it because I don't care, but you make me out to be a bad friend or something when I'm not, I'm the best thing that could happen to somebody with nuts for brains. So what's Abel got to do with it, exactly?

So Steve had kissed him.

Steve didn't tend to make his points known with words. Or he hadn't, back then. He'd been -- he'd been more about actions. So. A kiss. That had happened. One hundred percent. Yes. 

Then, also a thing Bucky trusted was real: "You think this makes  _me_  a good friend to  _you_ , Buck?"

And Bucky couldn't remember what he'd said in response. Not really. He could fill it in.

God, not on the mouth, Steve. You'll get sick. What you are is a goddamn defective because honestly, I just told you I was ready to cough up a lung and not two seconds later you've got your tongue in my throat, and if this is how you deal with sick people no wonder you've got a hospital record longer and more complicated than the annotated laws of the state of New York. You'll get sick, you moron. I'm not nursing you next week when you're laid up in bed. Because I warned you.

Maybe I'll bring you some soup or something. But I warned you.

Now you're gonna get sick. 

-

"You remember that fight over Abel?" Bucky asked.

"Do you?" Steve said carefully.

Obviously he fucking did, or he wouldn't be asking about it.

"What was my answer?" Bucky said.

Steve only stared at him calmly, infuriatingly. Like he was studying what Bucky would do next. Like he was going to take it down and report it to the doctors. He would. He would. It was what he had to do.

"You asked if -- if  _that_  -- made you a good friend to me," Bucky said. "Did I answer? What did I say?"

"Nothing ever tore our friendship apart, if that's what you mean," Steve said placidly. "You were my hero, Bucky. You did everything for me. Naturally if we fought, it wasn't for long. If I had doubts, they never interfered with what we had to do for each other. You understand that, don't you? We never doubted our commitment to each other."

Bucky blinked at him. It was like Steve had skipped over some crucial bit of information. The kiss. But how could he? Steve had to know about it. Steve had all the memories. Bucky just had the weak shadows of them, the pathetic imitations.

"There really was never any room for doubt in our relationship," Steve said. He smiled. He smiled with his whole mouth, perfectly, the white arc of his teeth looking so handsome, so wholesome. It bothered Bucky.

That night he thought he heard Steve get up across the hall and cross into the study and dial something on the phone. It was a rotary, and it made a little whirring noise just before Steve's fingers reached the numbers he needed.

"Yes, just a check in," Steve said. Pause. "I know." Pause. Pause. "There's nowhere  _to_  go." Pause. Pause. Pause. "And would that be so bad?" Pause. "Well, good luck finding somebody else. What happened to the last guy again? Oh, right. Good luck." Pause. Pause. "No, they're not. They're not so important. They go, somebody else'll fill in their spots. That's how this works, the whole sitting on our hands game. I'll tell you, I'm going out of my head doing nothing but this." Pause. "Yes, but just because I'm good at it doesn't mean I like it." Pause. Pause. "I think you're missing the whole concept. The truth is we're free to do as we like. No one else is, but we are. That's the appeal: that we're free. But everyone else gets so caught up. Everyone wants nothing but their security, and then they don't think of the freedom they'd get without it."

Pause.

"I already told you. Say they do see him and then we have to take care of it. So what? They're not so important. I won't be intimidated by them. Don't make me look down on you. I don't want to. It makes me feel lousy, you know, scorning people. But you're a hypocrite. You're getting caught up in your own sense of security, because you think it's so necessary to have these people here as fall guys. Well, that's cowardly. And if you need a living and breathing fall guy so bad, maybe you don't understand the rules of the game."

-

After Steve left the next morning Bucky approached the telephone, but for all the great technological promise he represented, with his heat-up arm and the impressive horrible memories he couldn't access, he didn't know how to make it tell him who it was that Steve had called last night. 

He stared at the phone.

The phone sat there saying nothing in response. 

It was an orange phone: the color of the Giants, whose move Steve had also neglected to mention. Thinking of this brought on a whole new wave of anger and Bucky flipped the phone over, examining it, wanting answers. On the underside there was a factory-assigned identification number and a sticker with the address of the phone company, which was some one hundred miles to the south, and then another note that said an agent of theirs could be found at the bank on Main Street.

So he went to the bank on Main Street. This time he went in full daylight, which made his throat seize up a little. Everyone could see him coming. They might not know who he was, but he was fairly hard to miss. Steve had said he should let his beard grow: this was supposed to be in fashion among a subset of younger men these days, and anyway he didn't need to groom when there was the all-important work of relaxing to do. But everyone in this town was clean-shaven, and in his ratty green jacket with a full beard he was very noticeable, and people stared openly at him as he passed. 

The boy scouts of Philadelphia Public number 75 were sitting on benches in front of the bank. 

"Damn, look at that guy," said one. 

Bucky hated young people.

There were a surprising number of people inside the bank. An old woman had doddered her way up to the only available teller and was chatting amiably with the man behind the glass, never mind the line of two or three anxious people waiting in line behind her. A younger woman was filling out some papers to the side. Her daughter was trying to sneak into a corner office for some reason, and she kept yanking her back. Four or five men in these offices were on telephones, occasionally putting their hands on the receivers in order to say terse things to the stone-faced people sitting in front of them.

Bucky stood for a minute on the threshold, not knowing what to do next.

He recalled a very busy, very official looking building, and inside it many many people, sort of a tanned and dark-eyed set like they were eternally summering, some of them not wearing shoes, some wearing military uniform, all milling around, and official signs in maybe Spanish on the walls, and a whole lot of oppressive heat everywhere, woven straw fans bobbing in the air, the arc of bullets and a lot of screaming.

But he must be making this up, he thought, because the doctors had said he was all about Russian winters and operations in the snow and similar things, not heat. Heat made no sense. This was why he couldn't trust himself. He was always making things up like this. 

While he was thinking up these fantasies he'd walked into an office, entirely without thinking about it, and drawn closed the wooden door and flipped down the wooden shade, and interrupted a bank officer's telephone call, and this felt as natural as the made up memory. A distant voice told him it was maybe rude. But he'd felt backed into a corner, there on the threshold in broad daylight. They'd told him he was streamlined to get himself out of situations like that. Well. Good.

He said, "I need the agent for the telephone company. I'm staying at--" he rattled off the address for the green house, which he must have committed to memory at some point, and he outlined some problem having to do with a very important call he'd accidentally hung up on last night, and what was the procedure for getting the number again, he couldn't trust the people on the other end to call back, it was of course to do with the government and an issue of his rights, which no one was respecting.

This was a magic set of words, he knew. Rights that no one is respecting. Someone on the radio had been railing about it on the drive up here, the rights I protect with my anti-ROTC group, and Steve had made a kind of exasperated laugh to hear it. "Why's it funny?" Bucky had asked. And Steve had said that rights really were just a kind of thing Americans called up, they were the trump card in the game, that was what they were supposed to be defending. But the sad thing was that the higher-ups knew perfectly well that if someone was getting to be really annoying with it you could change the game on them; and anyway if you defended one right you might trample on another, so this is useless, you have to have beliefs, not trump cards.

But the banker wasn't going to change the game. He blinked at Bucky, took him in, looked a little frightened. He said, after a minute, "That's Stewart. His office is--"

Bucky leaned forward, not totally aware he was doing it, and took the man's paperweight with his dead arm and made a dent in the marble of it, watching as the fine bits of it scattered on his jeans. 

"I'll go get him for you," said the man hurriedly, and stood, knocking over the wastebasket in his haste to get out the door. Bucky realized only belatedly that probably he wasn't going to get Stewart, he was going to get a security officer or something. Bucky stood, too, to prevent this. He didn't have to. The banker didn't make it very far. As he crossed the lobby he collided with a man coming through the door, looked back at him in annoyance, and then did a double-take and apologized a great deal. Which drew attention to this new man. Suddenly everyone was looking at the new man. 

He was not particularly young. He looked simultaneously wound up and exhausted; it was like behind his dark eyes and underneath his wonderful expensive coat and suit he was running on batteries, but the batteries had begun to drain out. So the color was leaching from him: his trim facial hair had here and there some small lines of grey, and fainter lines were beginning to form around his features. Only the eyes looked at all well-powered. They were intelligent, cynical eyes, Bucky thought. The man said, "That's all right, that's all right. It's only my bank."

Then, theatrically, to someone standing just outside the threshold: "It is my bank, isn't it?"

"What kind of question is that?" was the long-suffering reply. "Am I supposed to tally up every bank you've ever dealt with to to see if this one counts? Are we talking your Swiss accounts?"

"Clearly those are in Switzerland; don't get smart," said the man. 

"It's your bank," said the person just outside the door. "You own most of the shares."

"Right. Well. I hereby declare that it's perfectly fine to collide with me and ruin my shoes and nearly kill me inside my own bank. Why not? Not a problem--"

Profuse apologies from the banker. Persons watching and clearing out of the offices to come apologize on behalf of the bank and the town. The tellers suddenly appearing at their stations, the officers emptying into the lobby and converging on the new man, who seemed not at all worried by it.

"You did stub my toe," he told the now-mortified banker. "Stewart! Hi, Stewart. He stubbed my toe. Yes, I just came up just now. Got a call. Realized I haven't been here in years. Like, oh, forty or fifty or a hundred years or something. But it's a Washington Irving town; nobody changes, nobody grows, so you don't have to tell me what I've missed. I know I haven't missed anything. Maybe a few people died. Write their names out, I'll send something to the families."

Bucky tuned him out. Got a call, he'd said. Maybe. Maybe Steve had been talking to this man. Not the old Stark. Not at all the same Stark.   

-

Bucky would have liked to interrogate Stark to see if they'd been discussing  _him_. But he felt a sudden terror at the notion. 

It was the same Stark and it was not; underneath this man, lurking in the blood of him, was Howard, who Bucky had known. So he was a walking specter in the Washington Irving town; he seemed to ride in and recall something long-ago, maybe something horrible that Bucky wasn't supposed to remember. The shape of the hands was just the same. The eyes were just the same. Everything else he had replaced -- this made the ghost more frightening, because it was an imperfect replica. This was why, for example, these few trees in front of the museum all stripped of leaves were terrifying. They stood before the molting trees. And it was a side by side comparison: on the one hand, the trees with still a touch of summer to them. On the other hand, the trees with nothing on them at all, bare, dead, an echo of the living trees, a promise of what all the countryside would become. 

This new Howard Stark was really just the same: he stood for impermanence. People also molted and lost the green summer touch. So wait a few decades and you wouldn't have the old Stark anymore, you would have to accept a whole new Stark. 

As with Steve, for example, who was also completely different now. Bucky was secretly furious at him for changing, for not being like these faint echoes of the Steve he could remember, for being not even a good  _ghost_  of the Steve he wanted to believe had existed. But the Stark-specter principle proved it: Steve had changed, and they all changed, and this was the only constant.

"What stays the same," Bucky said to himself, and it wasn't really a question because there was no possible answer.

"Shoeless Joe. He wasn't ever in, he's still not in, and he's never gonna be in," said someone to his left.

Bucky turned. There was a boy sitting on the bench in front of the Hall of Fame scoreboard standings. He was the same boy from the woods, the older black boy, more a young man. The one who hadn't liked his counselor much and hadn't seemed to find much interest in Abner Stark's tower. He had abandoned his scout necktie. It took a few moments for Bucky to understand what he was saying. Baseball. He thought Bucky was talking about baseball.

It was hard to form words and talk to the boy for some reason. This was not like in the bank. Bucky was not so intimidated that his impulses simply took care of the situation for him. This boy was no danger at all -- lanky, tall, not fully grown, inquisitive, clever-seeming, but no danger. 

"Not just Joe. The, uh, the black players--" Bucky said. He had known black people, of course, but not really known them, he thought, because it wasn't like they seemed unnatural but it was more that he felt as though he'd never had to think about what to say to them, because probably he hadn't said much to very many of them at all. 

Well. Gabe. And he thought he could remember a few black people who would go down Atlantic Avenue to the mosque in their well-kept cars. But that was it. So it was all unfamiliarity when it came to talking to this boy, there was no echo, for once, of someone Bucky might have known. Maybe this relieved him a little.

"Jackie Robinson's in," said the boy. Then, like he'd underestimated Bucky and suddenly found him interesting, "Oh, you mean the Negro League. You pick up  _Only The Ball Was White_?"

This was, maybe, a book. Bucky shook his head very quickly. He didn't read. He didn't think he'd ever been a reader, and anyway he didn't know if they'd give him books if he asked for them. And for his part Steve seemed to be the kind of person who knew books and could mention books but was, acceptably, too busy to ever actually be seen picking one up. Still, Bucky filed away the title in case Steve knew something about it, in case Steve might tell him.

"Heard Satchel Paige gave these guys hell," said the boy in a pleased way, jerking a thumb at the building behind him. "I was pretty happy about that. 'Cause you know who they put in there first chance? Landis. But here they are giving  _shit_ \--" he said this word like he was delighted to say it, "--to Satchel Paige." 

"Junior!" said the white counselor from somewhere across the street. "I need you over here!"

"Yeah, I'm coming," said the boy. "Talking to a  _veteran_. Can't I talk to a veteran now? What side are you on? 'Scuse me, vet, Robert Bly over here wants to talk to me."

Then he stood up and walked off. He had a very deliberate, powerful walk for his age. Bucky wondered if he actually played baseball, if he was an athlete. He wondered how long the Philadelphia Public boys would be in town. He liked Junior. He felt lighter; he felt like maybe he'd known lots of  _boys_ , and had been that kind of boy, a confident, slightly foulmouthed boy. Maybe Steve had been like that.

No. He had to stop thinking of the old Steve. Had to stop comparing the Steves. 

-

"Shoeless Joe, Jackie Robinson, Landis, Satchel Paige," Bucky said at dinner.

"Hmmm?" said Steve. He had a silver fork halfway to his mouth, but it wasn't real silver, it was something else, that cheap and lightweight stuff. Bucky thought of the actual silver fork he could remember. How it had gone right into the external jugular so fast that the blood sprayed out and painted the woman's gold necklace, and his living hand and his cheek, and the opposite wall.

"I know some of those names," Bucky said. "But not all of them."

"Robinson was the first black baseball player," Steve said, after he'd chewed and swallowed.

Right. The first one. So he had to have played ages ago. Ages before even Bucky had been around. Maybe before the founding of the Negro League. Maybe he'd slipped in by accident, sometime when the game had first started, back in the days of--of the private clubs. Bucky thought there had been private clubs. Back during the Civil War. Back when the country was very very young.

"What team did he play for?" Bucky asked.

"The Dodgers, of course," Steve said casually, like this was no big deal.

It Ain't Me. It Ain't Me, said the radio.

-

That night Bucky sat in his room and tried to remember. Really tried, even though he wasn't supposed to try at all, and whenever he made the effort it was no use. If he wanted the Dodgers and his parents and Atlantic Avenue and Steve, instead he got heat and bullets and bodies all piled up so that if one wanted to pass in any direction they were obliged to kick aside the wayward limbs, or else step on the flopped dead hands and hear the crack of bones, see something purely biological oozing into the mud and crackling leaves.

And when he tried for that (which he rarely did; he didn't want to see that), sometimes if he was lucky he got Steve. But either way it was hard going. He couldn't go to the gas station and pick up a map for his brain, but if he did he expected none of the highways would go where they were supposed to, the topography would bleed off the edge of the paper, the rivers would feed into the roads and the towns would be drowning inside the lakes.

Jackie Robinson he plainly didn't know, and neither did Steve, and this was the problem, because he couldn't shake the feeling that the first black Dodger would be very big for Steve. His Steve. The old Steve. 

What other information did he have?

Satchel Paige. This was Junior's player. Negro League, probably, going by the conversation. Bucky wouldn't know him. So he put that one aside.

Shoeless Joe. Landis. There was something there. He played the names over. Who were they? What did they mean? What had they meant to him, to Steve? 

"Knock knock," Steve said, at the door to the bedroom. He said it. He didn't do it. Bucky found this very annoying. Steve came and sat on the bed. He put a hand on Bucky's arm, the dead arm. He said, "You go down to the museum today, Bucky?"

No, Bucky's brain said right away. No. He had to say no. Because every day, before he left, Steve would make sure to say something like, "You stay in and relax, Bucky," or "You just wait upstairs until I get home, Bucky," or "You can go sit on the balcony today, Bucky; that's what you're doing today." 

But Bucky hadn't been doing any of that. 

He found it hard to lie to Steve. He always did. So instead he just said, "You said we were going to go see it. Together."

"Right," Steve said. Again with the wonderful look of apology. It looked great on him. Everything looked great on him. He never looked wrong. Shouldn't he look wrong? Bucky hadn't known this Steve for that long; he'd known a skinnier, less glorious Steve for longer. So there should be some--some sense of wrongness, like how there'd been with Stark. But maybe Bucky was creating the wrongness. The only thing wrong was how there was nothing wrong with this Steve. 

Steve said, "You should get some rest, Buck," and massaged his arm, even though Bucky couldn't feel it. But when he said that it was like he was absolutely right, completely correct. Because suddenly Bucky was very tired. He nodded off.

-

He dreamed he was in a shabby, ugly little room with higher ceilings than it deserved to have. There was a bed in there and a table and an old stove and a wardrobe, and Steve was sitting at the table with his head in his hands.

"I don't get how you're not mad," he said in a low voice. His voice had always been low -- no, back then it had seemed even lower, because he was so small and so unsuited to that voice he had. Now that he was bigger it was perfectly suited to him, and in fact sometimes didn't sound like the same voice at all.

"I don't get--" Steve said again, and then broke off. 

"What am I supposed to do?" Bucky said, shrugging. "You got scarlet fever, I tried to sneak in to see you. You got stranded in Jersey, I picked you up. You spent the night in lockup after that fight with Bill Bixby -- still stupid, by the way -- I was there in the morning. Someone arrests you for this somewhere, I guess I'll be posting bail. You think you kiss Abel Fontana and I'm gonna have conniptions? You think I'm gonna ban you from our friendship? Steve, be serious."

Steve looked at up him. He looked positively sick. His face was flushed and it wasn't a good look on him: red from his bushy eyebrows down to his droopy Irish mouth. Bucky began to worry that he really had caught something from the kiss.

"I kissed you!" Steve said. 

"Well, sure, but  _you're_  not gonna infect  _me_ ," Bucky said. 

This was, apparently, the wrong thing to say. Steve's face did not improve; it got worse. He wasn't meant to be purple with shame. It didn't go with his coloring. 

"Steve," Bucky said, as the real source of the problem finally occurred to him. "I-- I mean,  _I'm_  not--"

He wasn't. He'd never felt like he was, anyway. He was normal. He didn't have to turn to men. This was of course the source of Steve's latest problem: that women didn't give him the time of day. Probably it was like that for lots of queers. They couldn't get it regularly, so they improvised. There was something ingenious about it, Bucky thought wildly, ingeniously American. And so if he was in the same boat -- which he  _wasn't_  -- he could see it being just the same for him, could put himself in Steve's shoes, almost. It wasn't like it would be awful; quite the opposite. He liked the look of Steve, the courage of him, the humor, liked to touch him, could even imagine it would feel comforting to lie next to him, the way felt did with a woman, and actually it would be better, because Bucky wouldn't be relentlessly trying to impress him: that never really worked with Steve anyway.

Steve was still looking at him. Enough time had passed that Steve was looking suddenly thoughtful, perceptive. Bucky realized he didn't know what to say.

I'm not queer.

Well, he wasn't. He'd never gone off with Abel Fontana. But if he said so, it would be like saying he didn't like Steve, couldn't like Steve in that way. Though he  _couldn't_ like Steve like that, of course.

He said, lamely, "This isn't gonna change our friendship, Steve."

This was the right thing to say, the good thing to say. He was always, without meaning to, telling Steve what a good friend he was. Showing Steve, too. He delighted in it. It wasn't so much arrogance or condescension; it was just that he liked the person he was when he was helping Steve. He liked knowing he was loyal to Steve, liked everyone else knowing it, liked  _Steve_  knowing it, even if Steve didn't seem to care sometimes. But that wasn't the point. Bucky was proud of their friendship. 

But when he said that, it was like he'd dimmed something in Steve. Steve just looked down and blinked a little, that was all, like he'd been disappointed. He didn't say anything. Bucky didn't know what else he could say. They were quiet together for a few minutes, and when Steve caught Bucky looking at him he attempted a horrible kind of smile, too broad, with his whole mouth all contorted instead of just wryly stretching out his upper lip. This was not the way he usually smiled to show he was alright. It showed too many teeth. It looked wrong. 

"Look, Steve," Bucky said, trying to figure out what could make it right. He put a hand on Steve's shoulder to buy some time. Bucky was always touching Steve. Steve didn't touch back much. Maybe Steve hadn't wanted to touch Bucky with the feelings he had, thought it might be crossing some line. But, more likely, it was because Steve was used to being poked and prodded by nurses, or else to being punched, or else to just feeling sick and miserable and wanting to be left alone. So he wasn't very tactile. Sometimes Bucky would feel the press of his hand. That was all. Just the press. It always shook him a little, but in a good way.

"I like being your friend," Bucky said. "I'm always gonna be your friend, Steve. No matter what. But--" and this was to convince himself, more than anything else, "But there's rules to friendship." 

Steve looked up at Bucky, brave about it. "I broke one," he said.

"No!" Bucky said quickly. The truth was: Steve probably had. But that wasn't what Bucky was trying to say. He liked the way things were; he was scared of what would happen if--if he and Steve went that way. They weren't supposed to. Some things were too strange, too weird. What he and Steve had now was better, or at least it was safer and more secure. 

There were rules. About what was acceptable. And about how friendship worked, how it worked for them.

"I'm never gonna stop being your friend," he told Steve again, shaking his shoulder. "That's the rule. That's the game. Alright? A kiss isn't so bad. You're never gonna lose my friendship, and not over that."

After a minute, Steve said, "I know, Buck. It's not the kiss. I thought I'd lose you as a friend if I kissed you. That's why I did it."

Bucky blinked down at him.

"I wanted to lose your friendship and win something else," Steve said slowly, "So I threw the game, Buck. I threw the game." After a minute he added, in a wry and horribly guilty way, "I'm the Shoeless Joe Jackson of friendship, I guess."

"Say it ain't so, Joe," Bucky joked. It was a bad joke. He pulled Steve into a hug. He didn't know what else to do. He knew Steve wasn't going to touch him.

After this point Steve wasn't ever going to touch him. No more soft presses. Not after what he'd revealed. It would be up to Bucky. So when he woke up and his face was wet and Steve was gone and he was in the shag carpet room in the green house, he wondered, wildly, if he'd ever pulled through. Once he'd made sure it was up to him. There were rules to friendship. The rule after that was that Bucky was normal, and Steve was not. So Bucky initiated the touches. But you could change rules; Steve had said so himself. Had he ever let Steve change the rules of the game? Ever?

Or had he been too scared?

In the hallway Steve was on the phone again.

"No, of course I didn't know. Someone must have called him."

Pause. 

"No, my stance hasn't changed. Not at all. That would be cowardice."

-

He found it very hard to stay awake after the dream even though he wanted to. He wanted to go over it, commit it to memory. But he couldn't. His brain felt heavy, horrible. He drifted back to sleep. When he woke again he didn't feel any better. He could barely think; the light streaming in from the window hit him square in the face, and he didn't have the wherewithal to get up and draw the curtains, or even to turn away. He stayed where he was, blinking, tearing up, blinking again, closing his eyes, forgetting about the sunlight and opening his eyes, blinking again.

At some point Steve came in and he only very vaguely understood it. Steve sat on the bed and put his hand on the dead arm, maybe. Bucky didn't know. He couldn't feel it. But after a minute he began to feel better, well enough to turn over and look at Steve, and there he was.

"I owe you a trip to the Hall of Fame," Steve said lightly. "How are you feeling? Tell me you're feeling well enough to go."

No. 

"Yes," Bucky managed. "I'm feeling well enough to go." He wanted to go. He thought he did. For some reason it hadn't occurred to him to go on his own; after all, Steve had reiterated over and over that they were supposed to do this together. But he found he wanted to. This had been a part of his life once. Wasn't he supposed to do things like this? To recover?

They had breakfast inside. They never went outside for breakfast. There was only one restaurant and anyway Bucky probably shouldn't be talking to people, not even waiters or busboys, Steve said. So this was their first time since they'd arrived that they went on an outing together, and although Bucky had told himself to look forward to this moment he found that he couldn't.

Behind them was the glittering lake. It was almost a Caribbean blue, like it had been transplanted from another place, like it was just masquerading as a New York lake. The park was fresh and green and wonderful; a girl and a collie played happily in the piles of red and gold leaves. And Steve in the sun was a vision: he was again dressed neatly, professionally, and it suited him to have these clothes and that body, every inch of him was made to be neat and open and calm like this, placed under the sun, his hair almost the color of cornsilk in places. 

Bucky felt horribly out of place next to him. He always pulled on the same ugly green jacket Steve had given him -- it was the only one he had -- and he still hadn't shaved, and his hair was too long. He tried to fall behind. Steve took his dead arm and steered him in front and said, a little disappointed, maybe, "We don't have to walk together, Bucky, but at least let me cover your back. You'll feel better."

So for the twenty meters to Main Street Bucky had to walk in front of him and he did not feel better. He felt like a prisoner. The ticket-seller at the museum looked him over like she was repelled and said, "Veteran's discount I guess, no, no need to show me anything," in an uncomfortable sort of way. So he got a discount, and then Steve ought to have pressed for one for himself, but he didn't; he paid full price because he was good like that, and it was his money anyway. 

Bucky didn't have money of his own. Or maybe he did somewhere. He'd never asked. It had never occurred to him until this point. He didn't know if it was alright to ask Steve. He didn't know what to say to Steve at all. He was mostly silent, trying to be interested in things, but unsure, because Steve mostly seemed to spend an appropriate amount of time in front of each exhibit before moving on to the next one, and Bucky couldn't tell whether they interested him or not. He tried to ask.

"Oh, don't worry about me," Steve said kindly. "This is really for your benefit."

They saw the plaques: metal things that didn't capture the spirit of the game. Just dead etched letters. TYRUS RAYMOND COBB. KENESAW MOUNTAIN LANDIS. HENRY LOUIS GEHRIG. Like gravestones. Then came the museum: an old bat, an old ball, six old catchers' mitts, falling-apart uniforms, Babe Ruth's old coffee mug, a chess set belonging to a Giant, ticket stubs of all varieties. There was one display on how the rules of the game had changed. It said: Have YOU Ever Played A Game Where You Couldn't Be Sure Of The Rules? Bucky was miserable to look at it. He was relieved when they moved to the display about America globalizing baseball. There were photographs of Yankees in Japan and a cricket player who'd been welcomed by a club in Connecticut. There was an old rubber ball that had been used by American sailors in what they'd boasted was the first game ever played on Cuban shores, but then a museum card said that actually this was wrong; the Cubans had picked up the game twenty years earlier entirely on their own. Bucky wondered how this could still be history. Steve said it was only relevant baseball history because the American sailors had said it was. But that was how all history worked, relevant or otherwise, baseball or otherwise. 

Actually, the more time went on, the more Steve seemed bored by the exhibits. He was always looking down the corridor in front of them at the next one, as though he were expecting something. Or, Bucky told himself, as though he were looking out for Bucky, making sure they didn't stumble on any crowds. But the museum was mostly empty. This was a weekday. Still, Steve was so good that he kept this up. He didn't even spend much time in front of Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers. 

Bucky wanted to spend more time in front of Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers.

It was not a Dodgers exhibit, it was clearly more about Jackie Robinson, and initially this didn't please Bucky. He felt as though he'd been cheated, and he couldn't say why. No. He could. Because--because--

And this wasn't  _trustworthy_ , and his brain was full of holes, and he knew no one would ever want to hear about it. It was just him filling in. But he felt a sudden jolt of love and anger when he saw the picture of the stadium, and the cornerstone, which was all that was left now. He thought of maybe being stuck in a very crowded place, in very uncomfortable slatted wood seats, too small for him, just fine for Steve, who was small anyway. They weren't good seats, but they did have a good view of Hilda Chester, and Bucky wasn't a fan of the team on the level that Steve was, but he was a fan of Hilda.

"That nut," Bucky would say, and she was, she was a fat little nut with greasy grey hair and a pink face and a cowbell, banging away at every game -- they even put her in the papers for it. Hilda Chester with her cowbell. There would be an organ playing the Victory Calliope and some people talking through the game (you could talk in baseball; the rules were so free, you could have a whole conversation if you were so inclined, it was a congenial kind of game like that), and other people scribbling out on their scorecards and Hilda Chester would be screaming, "Eacha heart out, ya bum," or something similar. She was no great model of Anglo-Scotch decorum, old Hilda.

But Steve would say something fond like, "She's not a nut, she's a fan. She told the  _Eagle_  she wanted to play herself, back in the twenties, and they wouldn't let her. Landis, I bet. Some people don't make it in through the door. But she would've given her all if she could've."

And maybe that was why Bucky remembered her so fondly. She was like Steve. Even when they hadn't let her in, still she gave it her all. And so maybe it was alright, the Dodgers display that was really a Jackie Robinson display. Because it was mostly the cornerstone for Ebbets Field and an old blue jacket and some cleats and then a large picture of the door: Dodgers, Keep Out. And in the picture the rules changed. There was Jackie Robinson opening the keep out door, and letting himself in.

This seemed momentous to Bucky. If Gabe could have seen it. If  _Steve_  could have seen it! 

But Steve was already seeing it and he was moving on. He'd caught sight of someone standing ahead of them in the corridor, looking at a different display. So he was already leaving. Gone. 

Maybe Bucky had made Hilda Chester up. Maybe he'd made up the slatted wooden seats and Steve refusing to talk, grimly scratching away at his scorecard, yelling support to Hilda. Maybe he'd just filled it all in and it wasn't real. Bucky couldn't trust his memories.

-

The other people in the corridor were no threat to Bucky. They were children. Specifically, they were the children from the mansion. The girl was no longer wearing her pinafore. She was in denim and kind of colorful t-shirt. The boy was dressed more primly, like an adult had picked out his clothes. 

"Hang on," Steve said, his hand on Bucky's arm again. "What is it, noon? They should be eating right now. It's lunchtime; they must be hungry. If they're going to be out and about then they need to be taken to the restaurant. Here, I might not come back for a bit."

Steve pressed some money into Bucky's dead hand and went down the hall to talk to the children. He could hear Steve asking after their parents. Their parents were down by the burial ground; this had been the plan for days now. Their parents had long wanted to go see a genuine American Native American burial ground, but it was too scary for Victor, and so Violeta had to come with him to the museum instead. 

"Well, that's hardly fair to you, Vi," Steve said easily. "And hey, I thought your dad was going to be up at the mansion today. I owe him those documents; I dropped them off with Stark and everything."

"He didn't get them," said Vi.

"Right. Stark. So of course he didn't." Steve said. "Your dad's got to see them by tonight, too. God, I-- I think I have to go get them and bring them down. How long will your parents be down here?"

At least another hour, said Vi, and Steve looked concerned and excused himself, and then turned and came back to Bucky. He said, "I have to go. But don't worry. You can talk to them. They're interesting. Even their daily lives, what they do all the time, are more interesting than people think. People never really talk to children. Talk to them. Find out. Anyway you only have to be wary of threats." Then, on his way out, to the children, "Oh, him? He's a vet," in a distracted way.

And so Bucky was alone in the corridor with the children. They stared at him in the weak museum light.

"You have to go to the restaurant," Bucky said, for lack of anything better to say. "It's lunchtime. I can do that. Take you to the restaurant, I mean. I have money."

Victor stared at him, uncomprehending. Vi said, "Are you some kind of creep?" 

They didn't want to go to the restaurant with him and this bothered him, because Steve had said very clearly that at this hour they should be at the restaurant. So Bucky felt the way he had on the threshold of the bank, almost. Like he was overwhelmed and his body needed to take over. He took a step towards them. They stepped back, frightened.

And then someone put a hand on his arm -- on the live arm, and it didn't even bother him or anything -- and Junior's voice said, "Nah, he's not a predator. He's just some weirdo with shellshock, like a Nam vet, you know. He's just weird."

-

Victor and Vi showed them where they were from once they were all in the restaurant, which had a large map of the world with America painted entirely with the pattern of the flag and then everywhere else peppered with helpful facts about climate and production and local custom. Actually parts of Canada and Mexico were also painted in the pattern of the American flag. It wasn't a very accurate map. It was from Reader's Digest, going by the lower left hand corner. Someone had pinned it to the wall above their table.

Victor traced a finger down to South America, speaking rapidly. Spanish. He didn't speak English. Bucky was surprised to find that  _he_  spoke Spanish, though, just like Victor did. And he understood it. He'd thought it was only Russian that he'd picked up, before. Maybe some German. Maybe even some Chinese. Spanish didn't make sense. 

"Where'd you learn to speak it? You're really good," said Vi.

"Overseas," Bucky lied. But then maybe it wasn't a lie.

"My dad learned some French overseas," Junior said. "He's a soldier, like you. Mind you, he's not around much."

" _Not_ ," the brave and socially-conscious Vi told Bucky severely, under her breath, "That this is typical of black American households." Lest Bucky overstep or something. Bucky got the sense that people were really careful about these things now. When he'd first seen the doctors he'd asked all sorts of questions about it, about what had changed socially. He realized now that it was because he wanted to hear if it was alright: him and Steve. Steve and Abel Fontana. But mostly him and Steve. 

He'd gotten back a whole primer. Martin Luther King, Black Panthers, student unrest, Feminine Mystique. It was hard to keep it all in his brain. 

"Yeah, my dad's white," said Junior, who'd apparently overheard. "So it would be really stupid to assume that."

Vi went pink. 

She wasn't a bad kid, Bucky decided. She and Victor were interesting, like Steve had said. Bucky asked after their lives. They had a diplomat father. Their mother was distantly related to the Starks. The family spent a lot of time in the US but most of them were going back soon, because they were needed. Everyone who was anyone was gearing up for next year's elections. And Mr. and Mrs. Mandel, Vi's parents, were not just anyones: they were definitely someones. 

Vi went to the boarding school near the lake but she wanted to go to school in Paris because originally the family had been European, they'd just fled during the thirties. Victor traveled with their parents and was tutored privately. Vi outlined a packed class schedule and tennis practice; she was only with her family for about an hour each weekday morning, and most of that time was spent with Victor in the Stark garden. Victor chattered on about his very regimented days learning Latin and Greek. He would be learning English next year. He said this very confidently, like he was sure he'd be picking it up in no time and might even be made a diplomat like his father. Or better yet: an astronaut. A moon-colonizer. A Pluto-colonizer. Bucky and Junior exchanged amused looks. Vi noticed it and, going pink again, told her brother to shut up. She seemed to want to impress Junior very much. 

She mostly wanted to talk to him, not to Bucky. She asked about what Junior was doing in Cooperstown (co-counselor for the Rescue Urban Nuisances Program, he told her), and what were his plans for his life (college, believe it or not, because his father did have some uses and these were centered on knowing a few people in certain administrative offices), and did he have any dreams (to be the first black man to  _truly_  crack the system, then become the head of the system, then dismantle the system; but, more likely, just end up buying into the system because that was what the American dream was about anyway. What's the Chilean dream like?), and where was he from (he'd lived everywhere for a while; like he'd said, his dad was military).

So it fell to Bucky to entertain Victor. He was very beautiful, very smart. Bucky was reminded of the little girls in his few trusted memories. Victor told Bucky that he was disappointed with the restaurant. He had expected a proper American diner, with lots of hot rod cars outside and pictures of Elvis Presley and red vinyl booths and shiny chrome spinning barstools. This just had regular tables, regular chairs, just like any old restaurant. It didn't even have its own building. It was just a big room in a basement with a kitchen in the back.

"Sí, es un rathskeller."

"Qué es un rathskeller?" said Junior, who'd neglected to mention that he knew some Spanish himself. Bucky decided that the term had fallen out of favor even in America, let alone for foreigners, and struggled with how to explain it in another language. He settled for 'basement restaurant,' which didn't appease Victor at all, since that was exactly his complaint.

But still. Over lunch, Bucky discovered that he was good with children. Children were finicky, problematic. They were a little arrogant, like Victor, or prickly and over-careful, like Vi, or else simply difficult to fully understand, like Junior, who wasn't a child any more anyway. But this just made them chaotic, and Bucky was fine with chaos. After everything he'd done, of course he was. He was used to insistent death and bombs, machine guns, grenades; he knew diplomats mainly as dead bodies tied to chairs in Minsk hotels; and now all this had let up, the great murderous beat of decades had stopped and he hated it, hated staring at the calm, glittering lake from the balcony and not wanting to drown himself, exactly, but not being able to come up with any reason why he shouldn't.

But he had a good time with the children. They were a living breathing chaos he could indulge in. He bought Victor an extra milkshake, like the kind they might serve at an American diner, he told him. He watched Vi flirt awkwardly with Junior. She patted her hand through her long hair several times. Her hair  _was_  fair, but not really blonde. It was that kind of color that wasn't brown but wasn't really yellow. 

Steve's color. Not anymore. But it had been.

He thought of Steve looking up at him through his lashes and self-consciously running a hand through his hair, like Vi was doing now. Vi reached out a hand, laughing at something, and gently pressed Junior's wrist. He remembered the press of Steve's hand, the way Steve had stopped doing it. How it had fallen to Bucky to do the touching.

Had he? Had he ever done what he'd really wanted to do? What he wanted to do now?

-

Bucky came home later than he'd expected to. He and Junior had walked the kids to the movie theater, where they argued about which of several Westerns to see. They settled on an unconventional one about Bolivia; the leads on the posters looked like world-travelers. One had a ludicrous mustache but reminded Bucky of Steve. The other, maybe, was the Bucky. But he didn't go in to see the film and confirm this. Instead he said goodbye to Junior and stood around waiting for Steve in front of the museum. Steve didn't appear. When he eventually gave up and went home Steve wasn't there either.

He didn't know what to do. He'd had a good day, comparatively, but now there was nothing. No Steve. And no instructions; he was usually supposed to sit up on the balcony, but it was dark now and the vista wasn't very relaxing. At night the lake became a much eerier replica of its daytime self, and its black edges seemed to bleed onto the surrounding mountains; the whole thing was a formless and frightening lump. 

So he sat at the table waiting for Steve to come home.

He imagined Steve across from him. What if Steve was here? And they talked? Really talked. Not just Steve avoiding his questions, routinely filling in their past of shared dock jobs and illnesses and faithful friendship. But Steve talking to him as a person, not as a kind of project, even if it wasn't good for Bucky. What would that Steve say, if he were here?

He saw Steve in his mind's eye, not directly across from him at the table, which was where Steve always sat, but instead coming in and pulling up a seat very close. They were the two of them leaned over the same bar. Behind them someone snored -- Dum Dum, maybe -- and then Steve put a hand very close to him on the bar. Like he wanted to reach out and touch him, but couldn't quite. His touches were few and far between since the kiss. They'd picked up a little after Zola's table. Steve'd had had to carry Bucky out. That made a difference. And there was Peggy Carter. She made a difference. 

"You don't think it's strange that I like Peggy?" Steve said in a low voice. "That I like both?" 

"No," Bucky said truthfully. It had never occurred to him that Steve wouldn't also like women; Steve seemed grateful enough to go on double dates with them. Of course -- of course Peggy Carter had, had a kind of professional superiority to her. Bucky couldn't place it. He couldn't categorize it, couldn't say it. Not without sounding jealous, he thought. Not without sounding like he thought she and Steve didn't work. Of course they worked. That was the great insult of it. When she looked at Steve it was like she was really seeing him, and seeing a really worthwhile person. But she didn't look at everybody like that; just Steve. Most people seemed to be miles behind her. She had a coolness to her that Steve said was understandable, a beautiful dame in her position, but Bucky thought no, no. She looks at you like that because her looks are worth a lot and she doesn't give them out easy because she knows it. So you've got something valuable from her too.

And more fool me, I made sure I always looked at you the same way I looked at anybody. 

"You know, I didn't realize people could die on tables," Steve said quietly, after there had been silence for a bit. 

"What?" Bucky said.

"I didn't realize people could die on tables. I--for the longest time, I thought to die you had to be in a hospital bed and there had to be a sickness. I thought that was the only way. When I met Abel that was what we talked about. He was from Red Hook. He said, 'I didn't think people could die without holes inside them. I thought you needed bullet holes to die.' And I talked to Jim about it, when you weren't really there, after, you were drifting in and out on the way back to base. After the camp.

"Jim's ma used to say she'd die of shame. So when Jim was little he thought there had to be a shame, before you went. Like if you were Shoeless Joe Jackson or something, somebody who'd messed up, you would die of shame someday, but it didn't apply if you were a normal person. 

"I never talk about it with you. You don't seem made for that kind of talk, Buck. But I'd never thought about it even after I'd figured out all these other ways to die. It just didn't hit me, even with all the times I'd heard about surgeries. That people could die on tables."

This was a great speech for Steve. He carefully took Bucky's hand, bravely. And he held it for a second. Even with his hands larger than they should have been it was very gentle, just a press of his fingers.

-

When Steve came back it was very late. Bucky had left the door to his room open so that he might see Steve if he went to the telephone in the hall. He lay in bed and envisioned Steve crossing the hall, and in his mind the image was a little off, first the small Steve in the ugly large overcoat, then the Steve at the bar, so that when the real Steve stepped into place he seemed wrong.

He didn't pick up the telephone. He stood there with his hand over it. Then seemed to think better of it. When he turned around Bucky was already out of bed, standing in front of him. Bucky was very fast when he needed to be.

"I remembered about Abel Fontana," he said in a rush. "I know I told you before, but I remember all of it. I remember what you said you'd  _talked_  to him about, even. I--"

He had to say it. He felt -- felt like --

There had been times he hadn't known if Steve still existed. He'd been out of his element, it had been 1960 or so, no one around to confirm the war was even over, only orders. And Russian winters, they told him. And pain. So he hadn't known if Steve had lived or died. But now Bucky was here in the green house with nothing but Steve and his own anger and his own confusion, and he didn't need to be told what was important here. It wasn't his horrible, frustrated brain. It was Steve. 

But he couldn't read the look in Steve's eyes. Steve had on a kind of deliberate calm, maybe. Bucky tracked the rise and fall of his chest. His breathing had sped up.

After a minute, he said, "Bucky, I can't just respond to things like this. The doctors said--"

"You tell me things about our life together  _all the time_ ," Bucky said, frustrated. 

"Not specific memories," Steve said quickly. Then he looked up. "You lead me," he said simply. "You tell me."

So Bucky did what he thought maybe he'd always wanted to do. He brought up one hand -- the living hand, the flesh one -- to the back of Steve's neck, and pulled him in, and kissed him. His tongue suddenly felt heavy in Steve's mouth, strange, out of place. Was it supposed to feel like this? He tried to do this right but found he had no recollection of how to do it. He couldn't get the memory back, not of their first kiss, not of any kisses. 

"Bucky," Steve said into his mouth, "Bucky, stop." 

He pushed him off. Surprised, Bucky let him. Steve stared at him and, for a second, there was something like shock on his face. Bucky thought he knew what that was about.

"I can do this," Bucky insisted.

"Alright," Steve said after a minute. "Alright. Of course you can. Come here."

And he took Bucky and drew him into the other room, his darkened room, and pushed him onto the bed and then leaned over to turn on the lamp -- an ugly milk-glass thing with a key to switch it on, Bucky noted, oddly focused on it and unable to say why. 

Above him Steve was taking off his shirt. In the light of the milk-glass lamp he looked wonderful, but then he always looked wonderful. What else was new? He didn't have a single mark on him, not scars or birthmarks or anything. He was perfect. Bucky ought to have been expecting that.

"Come on," Steve said. "I want to see you." 

So Bucky obediently took his clothes off. Just a t-shirt and pants. It took no time at all, which was good, because Steve was impatient. He reached for the waistband of Bucky's briefs and pulled them down, pulled them right off; he seemed delighted that he could do this. Bucky wasn't use to seeing delight on Steve's face. It was so strange. And he felt horrible that it was so strange: Steve unused to delight. Steve had to be under a lot of pressure, and here he was making it worse, wandering around behind Steve's back, secretly furious with him. 

Steve straddled him, still wearing his jeans, and the seam of them cut into Bucky's crotch and it didn't feel particularly good. Actually Bucky was soft anyway. So mostly it just felt disagreeable; it felt like a lot. More than he'd been expecting. He wasn't doing this right; that was why. He was thinking too much. He'd wanted to be with Steve so badly, but now he was going about it wrong, and how was  _that_  supposed to show Steve? How was that supposed to snap them back into the people they'd been?

Bucky reached up and rolled Steve over so that he was on top. Steve seemed shocked that he could do this. He undid Steve's belt with a flourish -- he thought this made people happy during sex, maybe. Enthusiasm. People liked enthusiasm in bed. Steve liked it: he laughed. His laugh was throaty, deep, very full-sounding. It wasn't familiar to Bucky. It filled up the room. It threw Bucky off a little, and he froze.

But Steve just passed his hands over Bucky's thighs, admiring. Steve wasn't soft at all. Bucky could feel it through the jeans. Steve said, "C'mon, get off. You can't be the only one naked," so Bucky shifted obediently off and then Steve finished undressing. Then he got on the bed and looked at Bucky, very thoroughly and deliberately. Bucky didn't know why. He was missing an arm and only had a dead one in its place. His beard was horrible and so was his hair -- he'd searched for a razor and scissors in the bathroom, but there didn't seem to be any, and he didn't have it in him to ask Steve which ones  _he_  used. 

But Steve just said, "Look at you," in a very pleased way. Look at you. At the scars on him, at the way his body wasn't right anymore, at how it was too big, how it was built for a kind of automatic, deliberate threat that Bucky didn't even intend. He hadn't thought Steve would like it. It should make him happy that Steve liked it. It did. It did. Even if the gleam in Steve's eyes really wasn't what he'd expected. 

Steve moved towards him and again they reversed; now Bucky was on the bottom. And now Steve kissed him, and it really wasn't like the kiss before, the one in Steve's old room after the fight in the street. That had been -- there'd been no need to think about it. He'd just experienced it. But now he couldn't stop thinking. He had to direct his tongue, make it move, he thought. He thought that was what you did when you kissed. That was something like what Steve was doing, maybe. He didn't know. He was too uncomfortable to really contemplate it. 

Steve pulled back a little and spoke into Bucky's lip, forcefully, between his teeth biting Bucky’s lip somehow, Bucky didn’t know how, and he said Bucky was good at this.

Good. Good. What a relief.

But really Bucky wasn't sure he believed it. And Steve's hands were running along his body -- he thought maybe he ought to touch Steve back but he had no desire to. He had no desire to do anything. He noted that the curtains were blown into the room very forcefully all of a sudden, like there was a storm rolling over the lake outside. Steve's hands had made it down to Bucky's legs and under the back of his thighs. He pushed them up, or tried to, and Bucky obediently lifted them, and then Steve was grasping the underside of him, which Bucky thought maybe nobody had ever done before.

"Fuck," Steve said, pulling off him and exhaling hard. "There's no lube, is there? And we can't have you seriously damaged."

Maybe this was supposed to be comforting. It wasn't, really. Bucky felt the way Steve sounded -- out of breath, overcome, not really happy, more focused, grim. Steve sounded a little triumphant, too, but Bucky didn't feel that way himself. He nodded in answer to Steve. Of course. Of course he couldn't be damaged.

"Well, let's just improvise," Steve said. "Come on, I just want to hold you."

How romantic, Bucky thought distantly. But in practice it wasn't romantic. Steve moved on top of him very fast, touching places without warning with one hand, his other hand on his dick, and Bucky felt like he was being pushed in and out of the mattress. Steve was still hard against Bucky's stomach, and sometimes he would take Bucky's hands and put them places, but Bucky never really knew what to do once they were there. He was breathing very fast. He couldn't seem to stop. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, far too quickly. Steve was murmuring all kinds of things that sounded like he thought this was a compliment.  

At one point he took Bucky's live hand and guided it to Bucky's dick. Bucky was still soft. But he misunderstood -- he was so bad at this; what had happened to him? Had they done something? Something to make this terrify him? Bucky thought he'd been  _good_  at sex once -- and because he misunderstood he put his hand on Steve's dick instead. This was about Steve. This was about how Bucky had failed him, had been a coward, had chosen the security of friendship and so lost him, when that wasn't what Bucky had wanted at all. 

"Alright," Steve said, looking down at him, pleased. "Alright. I thought you'd want to--you know. For you. But this works."

And he told Bucky how to move his hand the right way. He was very good like this, Steve. A good person. His orders were very clear. When he came Bucky was very surprised. He ought to have been expecting it but he wasn't. Steve's come got on his chest and on his beard and on his cheek and on his dead arm. They had to clean it very carefully off of the arm afterwards. Steve was in a good mood when he did this. He cleaned the arm in just the right way. He was good at everything, Steve. He was perfect.

"Did you have fun with the kids?" he asked Bucky, passing him a washcloth so he could take care of his chest and his face. "Did you take them to the restaurant? Did you ask about their day?"

Bucky nodded after each question. He couldn't talk for some reason. He knew he ought to be relieved because Steve seemed happy, but he wasn't happy himself. He felt very tired. Not physically tired; he never got physically tired. But mentally tired, tired of himself. He didn't want to be himself all of a sudden. 

Even when he did things right, like he had right now, he still felt like he was doing the wrong things.

Steve's elbow knocked into the radio and turned it on, and Steve hummed along with the song for a bit.  

"Bucky," he said, very seriously. "One thing I have to remind you about those kids is that they're just like every American kid, really, even if they're not from here. I mean, when I look at them I think of what we're doing. Defending. And that's the most important thing. The meaning of defense. What it means to be a hero. Well. you've always been the real hero. You've always been able to do what needed doing. Do you understand?"

Bucky nodded.

It Ain't Me, screamed the radio.

- 

He didn't want to get up the next morning, but Steve made him eat something. What use was an American hero who was wasting away? None. So Bucky had some soft-cooked eggs and then Steve told him to stay in, and for the first time he wanted to. He wanted to very much. He didn't even want to go on the balcony. He wanted to lie curled in on himself and think of nothing, which was what he was supposed to be thinking about anyway.

Steve affectionately put one hand on his dead arm and another on his cheek. He then unbuttoned the top of Bucky's shirt enough to see his chest again, the strange way his scars radiated out from his shoulder, the broadness of him, the menace. Bucky wasn't completely stupid. He understood that this was what he embodied now: menace. Upheaval. People looked at him and they just  _knew_. What was it Junior had said? Shellshock. Like a vet.

"Look at you," Steve said again, smiling his broad smile. Then he patted his arm. "Just relax today," he said.  

So he did. He didn't go out. He stayed in bed, and in his mind's eye he saw all kinds of strange things but they didn't bother him, because they didn't have to do with him: a girl with golden curls on the sand somewhere, holding a hot dog, and a girl with close-cropped gold hair against a wall, holding her hands in front of her face, and a little dark-eyed Chinese-looking boy smiling at Steve on a bridge, and a little dark-eyed Chinese-looking boy crying in front of Steve in a cement room. But he wasn't anywhere in these images, he thought. He just was. He was relaxed. Not being used for anything. Therefore he wasn't really anything at all. He just existed.

Someone rang the bell.

No one rang the bell. No one was supposed to. No one was supposed to visit the green house. He came back to himself, shocked, and the bell kept ringing. 

It was four Urban Nuisances with scout ties around their necks and boxes in their hands. Junior stood behind them, pushing them forward onto the stoop like a general. He said, without a hint of recognition, "Good morning, Mr. Biryuk."

"What?" Bucky said.

"Sorry, are you not Mr. Biryuk?" Junior asked. One of the smaller boys squirmed and Junior put a warning hand on his shoulder. He said, "Everyone in town told us that Mr. Biryuk is renting this place. 'He came up here to relax, probably. A veteran.' That's what they said. Are you Mr. Biryuk?"

Bucky thought Steve had assigned them names for this trip, mostly so they could go about unmolested. He'd heard Steve use his own fake name a couple times, but he'd never asked what name he was supposed to use instead of Bucky Barnes. He wasn't even supposed to be talking to people, so it seemed stupid to have a codename in the first place. Biryuk. Why not. He nodded slowly.

"Good, good," Junior said. "Good to know we have Mr. Biryuk and not somebody else. Anyway, this guy at the bank said Seth Biryuk was the only guy renting the house. Some other guy working with the Starks has been coming by to check in on you, everybody seems to think, because you freak people out and the Starks are nice like that. But I told Herbie here--" Here he shook the shoulder of the squirming boy, who looked ready to bite him, "--that you couldn't be so bad. Buy some Hershey's bars to support the Philly Inner City baseball league?"

He said this last part very significantly. As if on command, the four boys opened their four boxes, and they were filled to the brim with squashed candy bars. Bucky picked one up and felt it with his dead hand, and he ended up puncturing the plastic. Melted chocolate squirted all over his glove. Herbie looked at him accusatorially. 

"Let me just get some money," he said, but when he went inside to look for money he didn't have any. He'd spent it all on Victor and Vi's lunch. Junior had seen him spend it all. That was why he'd pitched in and bought his own lunch and not complained. Bucky went back to the stoop, perplexed, and Junior looked at him blandly and said, "Right, well. If you can't afford it right now, we're at campsite number seven. I'm off-duty from three to four, when Herbie here's gonna be making lanyards with some nice lady from the church--"

 Herbie scowled.  

"--and I'll be waiting to take your cash. Come on." 

And Junior pulled the kids off the stoop. 

"Are you kidding? He owes me for that candy bar," Herbie complained.  

Puzzled, Bucky shut the door.

Then he thought about it. Mr. Seth Biryuk is the only person renting the house. Some other guy is coming by to check on you because you freak people out. Then, with a degree of sarcasm Junior had relished: the Starks are  _nice like that_.

But this made no sense. Steve wasn't coming by to check on him. Steve lived here. Of course, Steve came by very very late at night. And he left every morning, but often very early then as well. So maybe people were under the mistaken impression that Steve wasn't connected to Bucky somehow, that he was just performing a public service: keeping the crazy visitor in check.

 This guy at the bank said Seth Biryuk is the only guy renting the house. 

That wasn't Steve's codename. It had to be Bucky's. But Bucky didn't even have any money. Why was the house being rented in his name? 

I'll be at campsite number seven. I'll be free from three to four.

- 

"Are you playing at secret agent or something?" Bucky asked Junior, when he reached campsite seven.

It was a fair question. And Bucky knew actual secret agents, or thought he did, so it was humiliating to be yanked around by someone who was maybe eighteen, tops. Even if maybe-eighteen was tall and authoritative for his age, appropriately clothed in combat green (he always seemed free of the necktie that would have marked him as a boy scout and not some kind of army scout), and was in the process of arranging binoculars, Buck 119 hunting knife, Swiss army knife, monogrammed fire pistons, and compass in his kit. He had a number of patches sewn onto a jacket in the bottom of the kit, Bucky saw, but he didn't seem to wear the jacket. This annoyed Bucky. The patches would have given him some more information on Junior, some idea of who he was dealing with. But Junior seemed to be powered mostly by insufferable teenage mystique. He had absent patches, an absent dad, no discernible hometown, very little concrete connection to his charges.

Really Bucky didn't understand how he'd ever assumed he might have been like Junior as a child. He didn't know much about his teenage self, but he thought he hadn't been this -- this elusive and irritating. Junior was no analogue of his. Junior was something completely different. 

"You wonder if maybe that guy that lives at your place is scamming you?" Junior said, point blank. 

"No," Bucky said. 

 _No_. Steve would never--  

He wasn't--

"You can dial down the threat," Junior said coolly, bored. Bucky realized he'd gotten up without thinking about it, towered over Junior, had him pinned to a tree, had his live arm twitching towards the hunting knife. 

He'd had no idea he was doing this. He felt ashamed. He put down his arm and stepped back, horrified.

"Pull up to the campfire," Junior said, gesturing at a pit with nothing in it. "Let me tell you a story." 

- 

This road here, this path along this side of the lake, it goes to only one place. That's the Stark mansion. It's not really a mansion. It's just old. Not even that old. But since the Stark who built it had parents who came over on the  _Anne_  or some shit, fine. We'll call it a mansion. Like, there are real mansions, real places over in England and Europe. They just call them houses. But we look at our houses and we call them mansions if they're old enough.

So the name a thing has. It doesn't mean anything in this country. Go down to the museum. Look at Lou's plaque. He's Henry. Look at Cy Young. He's Denton. Denton. Who the fuck is Denton? Look at Babe. He's George Herman. And these aren't just nicknames. Nobody knows who George Herman is; you tell me one person who knows. Nobody. George Herman's forgotten. Babe Ruth's like a hero in some myth. That's how we do it here. The real guy doesn't have to get recognized. We just want some myth we can hook into.  

So yeah. I'm telling you something about you. I mean, I don't  _know_. I'm not gonna say I look at you and I don't see Seth Biryuk. Say I told you that; what would you do? I see that arm. You didn't get an arm like that surgically attached because you missed hugging people. But you've gotta be smart about what I know anyway. I mean, you don't know who knows me. You don't know who might miss me if I vanished in the woods. Maybe you think nobody, right, nobody will. Just some black kid. But you don't know. My dad's a colonel. Maybe you think that's a lie, but you don't  _know_. So that's where I get my security. In what you don't know. And what you don't know I know. 

You don't know a whole lot. When you don't know, you can't act.

But that's not my story. Here's my story: 

The path goes only to one place. Say I notice someone sneaking down the path. There's only one place he can be going to. And it's the Stark mansion. Right, who's up there? Some pretty white lady, her black friend. I notice these things. In Philly, in New York, in Chicago, lots of people don't care anymore. Up here you notice. But there's usually three of them up there, always talking, always going over things. With Vi's parents. Vi's parents and the three of them.

First we have your friend, the blond guy. I never saw anybody look more trustworthy, so I don't trust him. It's like he's been engineered or something. And  _she_ , she I can't place at all. When she's in these talks nothing shows on her face she doesn't want you to see. I mean this is the kind of woman from years ago, a beautiful white lady in a negligee thirties gown with red lips, who nowadays doesn't last long, I mean that kind of beauty they eventually find in pieces on mountainsides in Norway or the beaches of Australia, you know, like a casualty of espionage. That's what she is. She's another era we sacrificed. She can't be anything else. And then there's the black guy, and look, this is not a cliche. My heart bleeds for him. He's really honest, he's really just a neighborhood guy, a friend. He's there with the other two, but he's not really involved, you know. He's support. 

Fuck, it's like a movie. If I were a secret agent I wouldn't be support. 

But that's what I mean. He's just so nice, this guy, the black guy. He's been reading the paper over dinner: the Chicago Eight. Wow, does this upset him, what's happening in Chicago. Really upsets him. Not disillusioned. So genuine. And he's using some name that's so common, too, that it might be his real name: Jackson, Wilson, Smith, some shit like that. And he and your friend -- you never saw two people get along so well.  

"Do you think this'll hold it off?" he asks your friend. This was when I went up to see what you were looking at. The same day. Vi'd gone back to school and Victor was inside and the parents were with that woman; she's really the one in charge, though I don't think everybody knows it. The black guy was in the garden. So was your friend.

And he's really concerned. He's almost ethical. Your friend. He says, "You don't think Mandel can do it."

"No, no," says Jackson-Wilson. "I think Mandel shouldn't. But I can't tell her that. I can't. She's all about doublespeak these days. She's someone I don't know. But I always trusted you, from the minute I saw you. Honestly. Look at me honestly and tell me Mandel's doing the right thing."

He's like a real therapist, this Jackson-Wilson. He's shooting out these questions he already knows the answer to. That kind of mental call and response. You know what it is. Somebody's leading you on a rope to the only answer you can give, the only sensible answer.

He goes, "Jesus, this is the choice of an entire nation we're talking about. This is people deciding for themselves. You remember when we first met, when I first really got to know her well? The whole point was that the little guy needed to have the facts, and, man, there couldn't be people on top making the decisions. There couldn't be just a few people on top with all the freedom. That's what's made my life so far. That's why I've fought against -- against the government!" 

And your friend, he looks really calm and like he gets it, he completely does. 

"Jackson-Wilson," he says, or whatever the name is. He says it like a promise. Like he's a politician talking to some constituent with no house and no job and a photogenic face and a baby. He says, "Jackson-Wilson, it's this, or we give in to Stark." 

"What?" says Jackson-Wilson. Completely thrown.

"Don't you know?" he says. "Stark's been talking to the higher ups. If this doesn't go our way, it goes to him. Defender of freedom that he is. Do you know what that means? Do you know what kind of profits that gives him? Stark, deciding for everybody. Either we make the choice. Or he does. But nobody else is going to. Mandel has to hold it off. Because it--it's Stark. Look, I didn't want to tell you. But it's Stark who really wants things to go to shit." 

"But--but Stark's on our  _side_ ," says Jackson-Wilson. "I--I have to call him--"

"He won't give you an answer," says your friend. "Not a straight one. I'm sorry but there it is." 

And then wouldn't you believe it but after that Stark shows up. And there's a wedge there now. Jackson-Wilson doesn't trust him anymore. He doesn't know what Stark might do. 

Whatever they're trying to hold off, it involves Stark. Stark Industries. 

I'm thinking where you fit in all this. So I go to the bank; it's the one building in the whole town where anybody knows anything for some reason. Some guy there really doesn't like you, you know. He says: that's the man in the green house. Let me see. Yeah. Seth Biryuk.

An agent of Mr. Stark's is keeping an eye on him for us. Mr. Stark is good like that. When I ask around, it turns out this agent is your friend. But he doesn't seem to like Mr. Stark much. I go back to the mansion, and he's not working for Mr. Stark. He's working with the woman. He's telling Wilson-Jackson not to trust Stark. So what's going on? Why the lie? There is a lie there. Does Stark know his agent doesn't trust him? 

And this Seth Biryuk. Why is he even here? Does Seth Biryuk know he's supposedly being watched for Stark, so Stark can look nice in front of the town? 

But you wouldn't be here if you did know. You wouldn't be here. You'd have the information already. What I told you on the stoop wouldn't have been a surprise.

You do owe me for Herb's candy bar, though. There's that.

- 

"Steve has a reason," Bucky said immediately. He didn't even have to think about it. Steve had to have a reason. 

"Steve," Junior said slowly. Like Bucky had just confirmed something for him. 

Well, what did Bucky care? What did he care if Junior knew his real identity, and Steve's, too? Who was he going to tell? His counselor? His mythic dad? Herbie? The broccoli clump forest?

"Alright," Junior said. "Steve has a reason. For what? For setting this other guy against Stark? For lying about whether he's living with you or just checking in on you?" Then, slyly, like he was guessing: "For renting a house in your name?"

"All of it," Bucky said. "All of it. He--he looks out for me. He's good to me, Steve. He--"

"He's distanced himself from you," Junior said. "Nobody in the town knows you two really know each other. You're some crazy guy who descended on them for no reason. You're a member of the Manson family for all they know. Him, he's got credibility; he's with the Starks." 

But clearly Steve wouldn't want Bucky connected to the Starks if Stark couldn't be trusted. So Bucky shook his head. No. No. Junior didn't know Steve. 

Junior said, "He set you up to have lunch with the Mandel kids -- I saw him give you the money. That looks suspicious." 

"You're suspicious of him because he wanted to see two kids fed?" Bucky said, frustrated. 

"I'm suspicious of  _you_. You were seen taking some kids you don't even know to lunch. I'm suspicious of you. That's my point.  

"Listen, maybe you trust him. Maybe you do. You've got the face -- I mean the actual  _face_  -- of a dead army hero nobody really remembers except for military brats, you're confused as shit every time I see you, you clearly have no other friends. You need somebody to trust. I get that. I think it's stupid, but I get it. But you have to go out and get some more information on what he's doing, man. Maybe you can help him if what he's trying to do blows up in his face. But you can't do that if you look like the crazy one." 

He had a point. Bucky was no use to Steve the way he was: aimless, uninformed. He was groping after something he couldn't identify right now. He didn't know why Steve was here. He didn't know what Steve needed. Steve didn't let him know. Steve was too concerned about him to really involve him.

"The best defense is a good offense," Junior said. "And you can't mount a good offense if you don't know what you're doing."

True. Mostly. But Bucky didn't think in terms of defense and offense. This was -- this was why he'd gone in for an uncomfortable wooden slat-seats game, a game that could drag on, a congenial game, a game for people-watching. A game where offense and defense weren't the  _point_. In baseball, you just had to hold on and do as well as you could for as long as you could.  

That had really suited Steve. Suited Bucky, too. 

But Steve wasn't playing that game anymore. 

- 

That night it was easier. Steve still didn't have lube; it was hard, apparently, to buy lube in a town where there were seven churches and the general store owner looked shocked if a customer so much as examined the vaseline. And Steve didn't want to draw attention to them. So they didn't go much farther than they had before. Bucky didn't want Steve on top of him again, didn't want Steve touching all over; it had been too overwhelming. So he got down on his knees instead, and Steve looked very gratified to see him like this, which was something. Remembering how much Steve liked enthusiasm, Bucky undid his belt and unzipped him without having to be asked, and Steve pulled his own underwear down eagerly, helpfully. Always helpful. And then Bucky took him in his mouth, Steve's hands pushing at the back of his head. It wasn't something Bucky knew, really, but it was over quickly, and all in all he was only touching Steve's cock, only smothered sometimes with his face in the gold hairs -- so golden, even down here -- and his eyes flat against Steve's perfectly-formed lower stomach.

He actually stroked himself this time, and it wasn't so bad. He wanted to want this. When he closed his eyes he saw Steve at the bar, Steve sitting at his table with his head in his hands. And he did want it then. He wanted that Steve.

He just had to relax, and think of nothing. And then maybe he'd want the Steve in front of him, too.

- 

Vi had given Junior a ticket for a seasonal lake cruise. Everyone who visited Cooperstown went on a seasonal lake cruise. No matter the season; that was just what the ticket called it, 'seasonal', even when it wasn't. So the cruise was normal. It wasn't suspicious. Bucky walked through the green park the next morning, knowing everyone was watching him, but now unafraid.  

The Mandels would be on the lake cruise as well, but then so would everyone. Or at least, so were six or seven more people, city people with fancy cameras and baseball caps. Junior had given Bucky a baseball cap. It had a white M set onto blue, with a red brim.

"Milwaukee Braves, and I want it back," he'd said. "But you gotta have a baseball cap on in this town, or else nobody knows why you're even up here. You'll like the Milwaukee Braves. They're like the Brooklyn Dodgers. They don't exist anymore, to be honest. Instead you get something a little different, a different name."

The boat was a roaring wooden thing, a fake steamboat with red trim and a fake wheel near the back; it was two levels high and seemed to belong on the Mississippi maybe a hundred years ago. It had patriotic bunting on it and a sign that declared it the Autumn Baseball Cruise. When Bucky got there the Mandels hadn't arrived, so he sat on a white bench on the dock and pretended to be relaxing under his cap. Most people were doing the same, only they were really relaxing, not pretending. The lake exerted a great calming force on everyone. It was the intense blueness of it in the heat of the morning, the way it was cupped by these great speckled mountains with their soft-looking clumps of trees. 

Even on the boat, even moving, the calm was absolute. The great wheel made a soothing lapping noise that did nothing to propel them; that was all the boat's engine. And on the upper deck stood the Mandels, talking amongst themselves, not noticing Bucky, who was sitting in one of the wooden booths partially obscured by bunting. 

They didn't really talk about anything interesting. Vi's grades, Victor's pet frog back in Santiago, this place with the rock music and if they went over the weekend. Would they see anything? Or was it too late? It was already autumn. Bucky was very alert, he was perhaps the most alert person on the boat, but the Mandels, as it happened, calmed him enormously; they had picked up the trick of it from the lake itself. He wasn't looking at the Mandels on the fake steamboat. He was looking at a kind of two-decker ferry, ugly, painted green, and on it were three girls with hair ranging from brown to chestnut and back again. It was a cool day very suddenly; the girls were all in coats with fur collars buttoned tight, and when they turned their heads he could see each had a ribbon in her hair, the curls were tumbling down, and down they came along the gangplank, and they were suddenly all around him, talking excitedly. 

 _What_  a trip,  _how_  nice the boys had been, no, no one was rude, of course not, Bucky, they know what you'd do to them. But boy they really aren't kidding. It's just the nicest slip of the New Jersey palisades for a nickel. A picnic just for a nickel. And boating, hiking, baseball. Becky's wearing new shoes, did you notice? She broke a heel on her old ones and poor Al, he drove all the way down to Hoboken to find her an exact pair.  

"Todavía no he visto ni  _una_  fotografía de Elvis Presley," said someone in front of him, and Bucky snapped back to reality.

Victor. It was Victor. The other Mandels were downstairs; Bucky could hear them laughing at something from up here. But Victor hadn't gone with them. He sat squirming across from Bucky, complaining about all the things he'd wanted to see -- not just stupid baseball, which was all they had in New York, but for example pictures of Elvis and also white cowboys with beer addictions and real moon dust and women singers with no clothes on and more frustrated young people than just his sister; he appeared to be under the impression that the United States contained the world's highest concentration of frustrated young people. How frustrated had Bucky been when he was young? Terribly? 

"Not at all that I can remember," Bucky told him in Spanish. Victor nodded, looking disappointed. Frustrated and young was the thing to be here. His father often complained that Vi had gone frustrated the minute she'd come to the US for her schooling. But really this was not true because in Chile she had enjoyed nueva canción, discussions that included the poor, the flourishing of democracy, and so on. Just like she did here, just like Americans liked. 

Did Bucky know his father's friend? Ese rubio, amigo de mi padre. Lo conoces? 

Bucky blinked at the abrupt change of subject. Victor waited expectantly, his eyes too pale in his tanned face. Why did Victor want to know? Hadn't he asked Steve if he knew Bucky? 

Bucky settled for saying that yes, they knew each other, but if Steve hadn't told Victor about it then it was a secret, and he and Vi had to keep it to themselves. Victor agreed. They shook on it. Victor was left-handed, so Bucky had to shake with the dead arm, and Victor felt it underneath his glove.

"Qué cosa!" Victor said. What was he? How had he lost it? How did someone lose a hand? A whole arm? Really? Couldn't you die from the blood loss, like if it poured out all at once and you lost too much?

I guess, Bucky told him. You can die from anything. Me, I went to war and I didn't die; I just lost this arm. You can lose an arm in a lot of ways. You can lose it if you're strapped to a table. You can lose it if it's got too many holes in it. What happened to me was: I went to war with a friend and, when he needed me a whole lot, I had an accident and I lost the arm in that accident. And after that I couldn't see him for a long time, even though he wanted to see me. He always wanted me, and I--I was never there for him in the way I should have been, the way he maybe wanted me to be. So I always figure I really lost the arm because of that. I lost it because of shame.

After this Victor was very quiet, awed, and Bucky was quiet too, which was just as well because the boat had docked again and the Mandels were calling for their son. Victor said goodbye very politely, and Bucky only belatedly realized he hadn't done any of the things Junior had suggested, he hadn't cornered an older Mandel and surreptitiously asked after their business, he hadn't wormed information out of the children. Of course, that plan had seemed to come from a kids' mystery: The Boy Detective on Glimmerglass Lake or something. But it would have given him more information than he had to begin with, which was the whole point of going on the lake cruise. 

He stood, dismayed.

Then sat back down. He'd heard a very familiar voice. 

"Daniel, Cecelia!" Steve said, down on the dock. "If you wanted to see the lake, you could have asked Stark." 

"You're already staying at my house," came Stark's voice, playfully irritable. "I'm not going to draw the line at lending you a boat or two. I offered one to--" 

"Yes, but I didn't want it," Steve cut in.

"Offered to let you stay at the mansion, too," needled Stark. "Even though you're such a killjoy--"

"I've got a place," said Steve. Someone laughed. A woman.

Stark said, "Right, no, so much more fun to be all by yourself in Cooperstown. Tell me: in your spare time, do you just sit alone, wrapped in the flag, shedding manly tears for your nation? That's the impression you give people. I don't know if you know that. I figure you should know..."

Their voices, and the Mandels', faded away. They were walking away from the dock. 

Bucky sat in the booth behind the bunting for a while, thinking. Stark didn't know he was here. He thought Steve was alone. This was not surprising. If Steve didn't trust him, then Steve would hardly trust him with  _Bucky_.  

But they hadn't been the only people waiting on the dock. Bucky had peered cautiously over the bunting. He'd seen them both standing silent, rolling their eyes at Stark's theatrics. Red. Older than he'd last seen her, but still so beautiful that Steve must think he was wasting his time when he wasn't looking at her. She was the one who'd laughed.

And next to her had been Junior's Wilson-Jackson-whatever his name is. Only Bucky knew his name. And he'd heard him murmur, "You really don't have to be alone, you know. You can stay with us." Like he felt bad for Steve. Like he didn't know Bucky was here either. But there really was no reason for Steve not to tell him about Bucky. Junior was right. Steve's friend was nice. He was kind, open, good. He was supportive. Bucky knew this about him: he knew someone ought to have  _told_  him Bucky was back. 

- 

Before he spoke to Steve, he went back to campsite number seven to return Junior's hat. The white counselor was teaching his charges a song most of them plainly had no interest in; Junior stood in the back, leaning against a tree, somehow above it all in a wonderfully teenage way. When he saw Bucky he craned his neck towards Abner Stark's tower. Bucky went down to the sandy embankment to wait. Junior arrived soon enough.

"Did you live in Milkwaukee?" Bucky asked, when he passed the hat back. He realized that somehow Junior had pieced together a great deal of his life, but he knew very little of Junior's. It was like Junior had said: just some black kid. But Bucky didn't want anyone to be just some anything. To be forgettable. He'd forgotten too many people. And the people he did still know were mutated. They were autumn trees. They'd sprung new colors. They might not recognize Bucky if they saw him. 

"I lived all over," said Junior. "You know why that's useful? Someone asks you where you're from, if you want, you can tell them any place. You just pick one. If it's a place they know, then they think they know you. They think they've got you. I say Milwaukee, you think, 'Oh, Hank Aaron fan,' or something." He paused. "Alright, that's  _true_. I like Hank Aaron." 

He put the hat on. The afternoon light hit the brim in such a way that it cast a kind of shadow over half his face, blocking out one eye. He looked very mysterious, very adult.  

"So what'd you find?" he asked Bucky. "Report."

He said it so authoritatively that Bucky almost did report. But then he held himself back. No. Junior was a kid. He was going to go to college. He had merit badges. 

"I can't tell you," Bucky said. "This is about me and Steve. And...other people. Good people. We--I have to figure this out on my own. It's probably my fault, anyway. Steve has his reasons--"

" _Steve_ ," Junior said.

That was all Junior said. Like he couldn't quite believe the name. Like he was missing something, or like he thought Bucky was. But Junior didn't know about the history Bucky had with Steve, about Steve carrying him off Zola's table, Steve being strong enough to stay by him even after Bucky had turned him down. 

Steve throwing the game for him.  

- 

While he waited for Steve to come home he walked around the house, impatient. Junior had given him a shaving razor a day ago; he said it was Bucky's choice since maybe some more people would recognize him without the beard, but with the beard he really did look horrible, completely crazy. So Bucky shaved carefully, and when he was done he felt good. The skin felt new, free. He pressed it tentatively with his live hand.

He'd put on the radio before he'd started shaving. He remembered Junior and Vi had been comparing tastes in music, and she'd mentioned a number of what she called Indigenous Artists, and he'd said Sam and Dave, just Sam and Dave; that's all I care about. 

Now the radio played all kinds of things, oddly hopeful things. Sugar honey, and so on: let the sunshine in, that's the way love is, the earth says hello. He didn't turn it off until it started up with the same old song, the one that seemed to be playing everywhere. Some Folks Are Born Made To Wave The Flag. 

It Ain't Me.  

No. He didn't want to hear that. He switched it off. Silence came over the green house. Better. 

He sat by the table again and waited for Steve. No thoughts of the old Steve came to him this time. His mind was oddly clear. He--he'd finally seen someone he could recognize without echoes of the future getting in the way. Someone who was just the same as he'd always been.  

"You didn't tell me," Bucky said right away, when Steve had come in. "You didn't tell me I wasn't the only Commando in this town."

Steve was silhouetted in the doorway. Outside the night had made the grass black, and the lake black, and the far-off school entirely black as well. Inside, everything was lit and Steve looked unnaturally glorious again. Again the colors of him made Bucky's head hurt, like they were wrong, completely off. Why  _was_  his hair so bright, anyway? 

"Did I ever tell you," Steve said in a too-careful voice, "What happened to Morita?"

"Morita?" Bucky echoed.

"Jim Morita," Steve said. "Oh, I know I'm not supposed to tell you things. Not without you remembering. But you know I'm on your side, so let's bend the rules just this once. Morita. It's funny, out of everyone you'd think Gabe would have had the hardest adjustment, the hardest time these past few decades. But no. It was Morita.

"He wasn't, I think, jumping to enlist. It was just that or the Tule Lake War Relocation Center. That's what they called it. They didn't say 'camp.' They said 'relocation center.' Names are important.

"So he goes away, in the meantime his family loses most of their stuff. The farm, too. They have to go live in barracks. His cousin goes to Topaz instead of Tule Lake; gets shot by a sentry. Morita is in all the newsreels -- in the back, but he's there. He's all wrapped up in the flag like the rest of the team. This is what this nation's about. You have the guys in front, the mythic guys. Then you have the fall guys. Well, he's not a fall guy. But everyone he knows is. Except for all of you. 

"So after the war he becomes a journalist. He has a place with SHIELD. It's offered. He doesn't want it. He didn't want to be a part of that mythic team, not really, and now he puts his money where his mouth is. Turns down a great job. To expose ugly truths for an ugly job. Where the US is dumping weapons and saying it's the Soviets, that kind of thing. He stays in touch with just the team, that's it. Usually Gabe, sometimes Dugan, the occasional letter to Dernier and Falsworth. But mostly he's traveling. He goes to Brazil, to see the Japanese-Brazilians of Sao Paolo. He's in Nicaragua. He's in Guatemala. And a letter comes to Dugan one day, in 1954, and it says he's in this little paranoid town, full of unrest, full of people scared over nothing, scared over phantom capitalists coming in and toppling the government. But it's dated from weeks back. Dugan reads it, puts it down. Tries to figure out how he's going to answer it. HIs girl comes in with breakfast, with the paper. And on page three they mention this little town in Guatemala. The same town. One day it was there, and the next day it was gone. Insurgents. It was insurgents. They dumped most of the townspeople in a mass grave.

"But not these American journalists. They got together a band of young men. They decided to fight. So they're not with the townspeople. They're easy to identify. They're found a little ways outside of town, in a ditch. With slugs -- and this is very important -- slugs from a  _Stark J5_  in their brains."

Bucky heard the table crack. He looked down. His dead arm had broken it somehow. It was in pieces. And somehow his throat was dry but his eyes were wet, very wet. He saw the ditch when Steve described it; he knew it intimately. It was like he'd been there. He said, "Stark was selling to insurgents? But--"

"Don't be a moron," Steve said. "Stark was selling to the same people he always sells to, which is us. We put those insurgents there."

Bucky stared at him.

"And the anxiety, too. The fear. The unrest. That was us. They elected someone we didn't like," Steve said, shrugging. "It's called destabilization. It's how we defend now."

"That's not defense!" Bucky said, louder than he realized, practically shouting right there in the green house.

Steve smiled, but it was an ugly smile. It was the wide, ugly, toothy smile he had these days. "It is now," he said. "We changed the rules. Stark, and Peggy Carter, and old Dum Dum. You left, and guess what? They let the rules change. That's what happened to the Commandos."

Then, quietly: "I was fine with you going all around town when you were bearded. It didn't hurt our cause. But now you're on boats with the Mandels all of a sudden. You've got your old face back. I really think you'll have to stay in. You're too recognizable."

And he came forward and touched Bucky's dead arm in a strange pattern of taps, and Bucky slumped down without meaning to, sagged, fell into the rubble of the table.

-

He saw Steve. 

It was the old Steve, the Steve who'd been sick and unable to go to Palisades Park, so that Bucky had lost his desire to go too, and afterwards he'd had to go around saying no, no, it wasn't that he hadn't gone because Steve hadn't gone. It was that he didn't like Jersey. That was it. His hatred for Jersey became a legendary thing. A kind lie he stretched and stretched until it reached mythic proportions.

Jersey, Steve. Really.

This time Steve was kneeling on the floor in his shirtsleeves, and in front of him was the wide-faced man with deep-set eyes, looking despairingly at a metal radiator; and just beyond them was the woman with the chestnut hair, fixing coffee and saying no, not that wrench, bucko; you'd think you'd never seen a toolbox before. Let Steve do it.

The Steve kneeling there was very unusual, in that nothing about him was especially shining or perfect, nothing was terribly good. He opened his mouth and swore at something when he got a look at the radiator. The chestnut-haired woman made a face that was all mock-offended Anglo-Scotch propriety. Meanwhile Steve's face was all screwed up in concentration. It was decidedly immigrant: the features were too big, the lashes were very long and feminine and gave him an air of marvelous uncaring, the eyebrows were too dark, and the whole thing sloped down to the mouth, sitting there above his chin like a full little bruise. 

He was industrious, too, Bucky remembered now. His life was not so much a life of constant sicknesses but of near-miraculous recoveries. Everyone got sick. Plenty of people died. Only Steve kept getting better, every time. Better and better and better. Just when someone counted him out, there he was a week later, exhausted but determined, saying, "Naw, I went down to the WPA office. They said I can't have my old job back, but I got this new job now, I guess I'm a handyman. It's not so bad. I can fix stuff. I mean, once I lift the toolbox I can."

This was Steve: when you needed him, he was there. He had perhaps a secret tally of all the favors Bucky had done him; he looked up at Bucky through his insouciant lashes as though to say, yes, you're good, really good, in fact the best. But I'm going to be the best, too.

And he was. He knew how to nurse people back to health and was thoroughly unafraid of illness. When Becky was laid up and there was nothing anyone could do, Steve was there to show them how to get through it, shifting aside her heavy nut brown hair to show Mrs. Barnes where to lay the camphor compress. He knew how to get the best prices for anything, knew how to be really proudly poor, which was a skill; it was not how to be defeated or pathetic, though people mistook poor for that all the time, but instead how to sound the yowl of injustice like a cat in an alleyway, so that everyone had to hear it. He was good with his hands, fast hands. He could create, draw. He could fix things. He liked fixing. He liked repairing. He did not take things apart. He built them up.

He did not destabilize.

"Here, you show your dad the difference between these screwdrivers. He can't see it," he said, with a tired grin, when Bucky stepped into the room.

Mr. Barnes threw up his hands, which were Bucky's hands, which were very unused to handling screwdrivers of any kind, soft and gentle living hands, both.

"I can't see it myself," Bucky said, after giving his mother a kiss. "We'll leave it up to you."

Steve shot him a look of mingled annoyance and gratitude. Gratitude because this was a chance to do something for himself. Also for all the Barneses. Steve liked doing things for other people. Almost a little too much. Bucky worried about him; he was a natural fall guy. 

"Did you hear about Shoeless Joe?" Bucky said. "They found him. He has a liquor store now somewhere in South Carolina. Ty Cobb walked in and saw him. It's in the paper."

"Well, he's sure as hell not allowed in the game anymore, so a liquor store suits just as well," said Mr. Barnes. And Bucky and his mother laughed.

"He still says he's innocent," Steve said quietly, doubtfully. "He still says they set him up. He didn't have a real lawyer, I read. So the game ate him up. He loved it and it spat on him."

Bucky and his mother stopped laughing.  

The greatest quality Steve had -- and this was one hundred percent true; it was the truest recollection Bucky had -- was that for someone so small Steve inhabited a very large moral space. At the time it did not make him seem especially good or perfect. It made him an uneasy person to be around, a proud and difficult person, a person who sometimes sucked the laughter out of a room with apology but no shame. A person who was always questioning, always airing doubts; who liked high ideals but couldn't always make himself believe in them. A person who was asking to be punched, people said.  

He had been good, but not the kind of good that got remembered. Not the kind of good people really bothered to mark down as a myth. He'd been good like Jim Morita, who he'd always liked best, next to Bucky, and next to Agent Carter. He'd put his money where his mouth was.

So what happened to people like that?

-

Bucky woke up and he was propped against the wall looking at the rubble, and he couldn't move.

The arm, he thought distantly. 

That dead arm. It wasn't really dead. It came alive for Steve, whenever Steve touched it.

"I really think you'll have to stay in," Steve had said. And now Bucky found it hard to move, very hard. He felt very sluggish. There was something inside him, inside his blood, the ghost of some Howard Stark product maybe, making it difficult for him to think, let alone get up.

"I really think you'll have to stay in," Steve had said.

No. No. There was a lie there. There was something Bucky hadn't wanted to face. So now inside him he had a furious howl, and he thought about Steve -- his Steve, the real Steve -- and he thought about: what happens to people like that?

Did you hear about Shoeless Jim? They found him in a ditch with a slug from a Stark J5 in his brain.

-

This was Washington Irving country. It was classic America, real America, the America of the general store and all the churches, where rights are like magic words. And in the magic country there was usually a ghost, and this time the ghost was Bucky.

It was very slow-going because he was so weighed down by whatever the arm was doing. He did not take the long road, the beautiful shining road with the boyscouts and the cloud mist. He took the road now that Steve -- no. Not-Steve -- always took. This was the tar highway next to the railroad track all covered in garbage. This path to the mansion had all along it wrappers and paper cups and coke bottles, bits of green glass: refuse. And to anyone who might care to look, shifting his way through the modern refuse, there was an old face, a face you might know if you were a military brat, maybe; some relic of an ancient game, a game nobody played anymore.

But eventually he came to the mansion. Silhouetted in the window, behind the curtains, were Stark and Stark's great true love, Steve's own long-suffering superior spy girl, and Stark was saying, "Well, how was I supposed to know she didn't want to be called sweetheart?"

Red said, "Young women don't like that, you know."

"You're young enough that you don't have to talk about them like they're a distant species," said Stark. "Anyway I'm not up on all the social movements. If housewives kill themselves it's none of my business. Though I did read the one about the Playboy bunny."

Bucky didn't even spare them a glance. They were -- they had changed. Once these people had had more doubts, he thought. But the decades had taken them and shaken them and now they commanded the world from a mansion high in the mountains, secure, untouchable, more free than everyone else. The doubts had fallen to the ground. They'd trampled them long ago, let them crackle underfoot, and moved on, accepting the new rules of the game.

He made it to the garden door. He realized that he'd been passed out for a long time. Most of the night. The people in the mansion were going to have breakfast soon. Vi would be driven up from the school in the car. She and her brother would be allotted some time in the garden together. They'd told Bucky this. Bucky had collected information on their daily schedule. Why?

He didn't have time to think on it. With effort, he wrenched open the door and stumbled into the house. Junior was right: it wasn't an especially big house, it was just an old house. Bucky tracked mud on the wood floors, the carpet. He avoided the place Stark and the spy were. He let his body take over. This was now ground forces in hostile territory. This was search and -- and destroy?

No. No, he was not destroying. He didn't want to destroy. He was doing what he always wanted to do: looking for his friend.

Beyond the kitchen there was a long hallway with rooms on all sides all overstuffed with Colonial furniture. In one he caught sight of a dark, deliberate, thoughtful body, more heavyset now, a little slower. But the spirit of him was the same. This was what stood out with people: the spirit of them. Some, like Stark, eroded over time and became awful, small. Some became harder, power and responsibility made them hold back the good parts of themselves, which they might have bestowed otherwise; this had happened to the great red-lipped heart Steve had loved. And some simply vanished, like Steve. In their place was something with the colors all wrong, something evil.

But this had not happened to Gabe. 

This--this was Gabe. This had been Gabe, this calm person always carefully, intelligently putting forward the other perspective. The shadow perspective. The one nobody took notice of.

Did you ever hear about the Negro Dodgers?

Very patient. There are things you do not know. I am like you, but not. I know of other parts of this country, this world. And because I know I don't have to blunder the way you do. I know the world you know and the world I know. You only know your own. Now I'm going to ask you a question. And you will see there's only one sensible answer. 

What had Gabe been doing these past few decades? To look at him, Bucky couldn't place him in mansions. He couldn't see written on Gabe's face any of this countryside politicking. He thought about black panthers, student unrest. He thought about Junior's words: this guy is really upset about the Chicago Eight. 

Gabe's mouth opened, closed. He stared at Bucky. Bucky was changed too, he knew. He felt a sudden horrible fear that Gabe wouldn't recognize him. He was ugly now. They'd told him he'd been taken by the Russians, after the war. He'd been turned into a weapon by the Russians. He didn't know if it was true; maybe it wasn't the Russians. Maybe it had been the good old U.S.A. all along, only they'd made a weapon and dumped it somewhere, made it look and sound and act Russian, and then said no, no, it wasn't us. It was the Soviets.

" _Bucky_?" Gabe said. There were tears in his eyes. Gabe had never been handsome, he'd been in the back of the filmreels usually and then pushed forward when they'd wanted to make a point about the nation being United. That was his job. That was how they'd used him. Bucky hadn't even thought about it at the time. But now he thought this was the best face he had seen in weeks: Gabe's. This was a real living face. There was honest pain in it, and fierce anger, too.

"Steve," he told Gabe. "That man isn't Steve. The blond one. The one who's always here. Peggy Carter's man, who's working with her. The one who told you about Stark. He's not--"

Gabe looked puzzled. He said, "Bucky, Steve is dead. Steve's been dead for over twenty years. Bucky, what happened to you?"

His throat closed up. He--this was what he hadn't wanted to know. This was why he'd followed the new Steve around, worshipped the new Steve. There had to be a Steve. He needed a Steve. He couldn't have--couldn't--

The image of Morita's ditch came up in his mind, of the bodies there, of how there were spaces in it for maybe all of them. Him. Steve. Jim. Gabe. Maybe even Dum Dum and the others. He saw this was inevitable now. This was the new object of the game. Not to do the best you could. But to bury the opposition.

He felt a great surge of hopelessness. There was nothing he could do. But even then he thought he knew what Steve or Jim would want him to say: the truth. They would want him to voice the doubt. He said to Gabe, "They killed Jim, too. Jim Morita. It was Stark weapons. It was a Stark bullet that they put there. Our side. This side. This is how they defend now. Their defense is an offense."

Gabe flinched. But then, strangely, he drew back. He crossed to the door and looked out down the hall, watchful, cautious. Then he hurried back to Bucky and said in a low voice, "I think I always knew. They--there'll be elections. In a year. In Chile. Peggy said, 'Howard knows the man who can fix these elections. So we won't let it happen again, Gabe.' Because when these people put in a communist, that's what happens. That's the price. So--"

He spoke slowly, ashamed. Bucky could see it on his face. Ashamed. Dying of shame.

"--so we brought them here. This is to fix the elections. Chile stays on our side. And no one gets hurt. No more Jims."

The way he said it, it was like he'd been looking for Jim the same way Bucky had been looking for Steve. It was a horrible thing to see: this naked look on his face. Bucky closed his eyes. And, oddly enough, Junior came to mind. 

Why are you even here?

Why  _had_  the not-Steve brought him here? He was the only piece that didn't fit. Him. Bucky. They didn't need Bucky to fix an election. Bucky was not a tool to be used so neatly, so carefully.

Under Gabe's astonished eye, Bucky took off his green jacket. His glove. Unbuttoned his shirt. There was the dead arm with all the wires and circuitry that the not-Steve could play like a complex instrument. Bucky idly wondered if maybe you flipped up one of those panels on the bicep and there it you'd find it: Stark's logo.

"He brought me here. That man. I don't know why," he told Gabe. "I'm--I'm not your friend anymore. I'm something else. I'm a weapon. Why do they need a weapon here? You have to tell someone. You have to get help before they--before they use me."

Gabe had always been quick, smart, no-frills. He nodded once. He crossed to the wardrobe in the corner, pulled out some clothes, pulled off his robe, put them on, reached into the bedside table and removed a tube of red lipstick, a few crumpled museum tickets. Took out a gun. He crossed to the bathroom and came back a second later, twisting a wedding ring onto his finger.

He said, "It'll be safer if I don't tell her. We don't know anything about you yet. How are you alive? Do you know?" Bucky shook his head. "Right. I thought not. Come on. We'll get down to New York, to see Dum Dum. Dum Dum we can trust."

But Bucky couldn't. 

He knew something was going to happen here, and soon. That shining, perfect, wide-smiling man, that defender of freedom with his wholesome American face -- he was planning something. And Bucky thought about Victor and Vi, these two like those girls on the ferryboat, and he thought they would need defending. Real defending. Not whatever they were calling it these days.

"Someone needs to watch out for the Mandels," he told Gabe. "They've always been in danger. I was supposed to learn their schedules."

-

Gabe was gone very fast. He left a note for his wife; he scrawled it in that red lipstick of hers, which Bucky thought maybe was supposed to be a kind of clue to her, a sign. Peggy Carter would have a marriage like this. A union of private looks and sacred signs. 

After Gabe had gotten in his car, started the engine, looked back at the house, driven down the highway, Bucky located Victor's room. It was just down the hall. He waited to see the maid go in to wake Victor up, then come out again. And then he slipped into this overstuffed, old, adult space, which didn't fit the inquisitive pale-eyed child sitting in the bed. Already talking to someone.

Steve. No. Not Steve. He was wearing a blue shirt and a blue tie and a blue suit -- all blue, like the spirit of the lake or the sky outside. His eyes looked very blue. He was humming something for Victor. It sounded like the Victory Calliope. Jaunty. Upbeat. Old-fashioned.

"Well, now that you're here, all I need to do is distract Stark and the Widow," he said, breaking his song but not looking up.

"What?" Bucky said. Victor said it too, because he didn't understand. The shining man above him smiled and patted down Victor's hair. Paternal.

"I don't want them dead. Or, I mean. I don't care," he told Bucky. "But Zola sees a use for them, and as long as people are useful we keep them around. You, for example. I'm glad you made it here. I knew you would."

"You left me -- you made me pass out. You said I should stay inside," Bucky said, shaking his head. This made no sense. "I was too recognizable."

"You are. You've forced our hand. You know how tricky you are? You only do what I want you to under two conditions. One, I make you. Then your mind is gone. You're on automatic. It's only partly-worthwhile to keep you like that. Zola's concerned about eroding your higher faculties. But then when you're yourself you're looking for Steve. So all we have to give you is a Steve. You do what he says. You're a very simple creature, you know."

He looked up, and the light glinted off of his hair, and Bucky didn't want to look at him but he didn't know how to look away. Steve was dead. There was only this person. 

"Quién es Steve?" said Victor, evidently picking up some of the conversation.

And this new Steve said, laughing a little, "Steve? Nadie. Ya se me olvidó." 

I've forgotten already, this man with the face like the whole country transmuted into a person was saying. I don't know who Steve is. I've forgotten Steve already. 

He patted Victor's hair and pointed out something on the bed. A book to hold Victor's attention. With his other hand he drew something out of his jacket. He held it up. Stark Industries, it said on the grip. Stark Industries. Then he put it back in his jacket and got up, stepped towards Bucky. Bucky thought he ought to step forward, step forward to menace this new Steve -- that was what he always did when he felt like this, felt trapped. But he couldn't. He stepped back instead. 

"You can't hurt me," said Steve, smiling broadly. "You won't. You spent so long telling yourself I was him. Do you know -- you're more like him than I am? There's a serum inside you. The way these things work is: they're just biology. They're not choice. It's really frustrating for us, but they only have the power you give them. So we've all heard the great legend: good becomes best, evil becomes worse. But you're a legend for the new America. Here's how you work: as long as you want something, you follow the rules that will make that something happen. We figured it out after we tested you a few times. Perfect obedience. But it only comes about through this lie you tell yourself. 'Here's Steve. I've gotta do it for Steve.' If you didn't have that -- maybe you'd just die. Maybe you'd just die from it. Don't worry, though. Zola's already working on a way around it. And I am, too. I mean, how much longer are you going to be able to trust me? You're going to have to evolve. Or we're going to keep using you this way. Steve is. Steve will keep breaking your heart.

"So you won't kill me. But somebody's gotta kill  _him_ ," this with a nod back towards the bed. "Both kids, actually. So either you do, or I do and it looks like you. But somebody will."

Bucky blinked at him.

He was empty. Nothing Steve said was a lie. This was all true. This was why he was here. But why? Why kill this child? And--

"Peggy Carter's not a widow," he croaked out.

"Oh, god," said Steve. "I wish you hadn't talked to Jones, I really do. See: by this time tomorrow she will be."

-

Bucky thought of Steve in that cement room with the crying child, the Chinese-looking child. Steve had been slimmer then, with greenish eyes, but always the same old tune: Bucky, we're soldiers. Soldiers follow orders, Bucky. That's what they do.

Order through chaos. Defense through offense. Freedom through fear. That's the ticket.

Then Steve in that hot building with the people that had kind of Native faces, and straw fans, and Steve was saying: this is the mission, Bucky, but when Bucky looked back at him he was very odd. He was thin-lipped with stubby lashes. He wasn't quite right.

He'd been in Minsk, Steve. With the diplomat tied to the chair.

Steve aiming the gun for him so he could kill the golden-haired girl, Steve in the burning villages. 

He'd been just behind Bucky when Bucky had cut open the woman's flesh and been so surprised, momentarily. There were the fetal stages of development. Steve had pointed them out to someone, bored-sounding.

Steve when the blood from the other woman's neck had sprayed out over the wall. 

Steve in the jungle, with the shovel, forcing it into a crying boy's hand: you dig the ditch. Steve with the Soviet slugs. Had that been Steve? Or him? Or had they been down in South America together, world travelers in an American Western, burying the opposition? 

Bucky and his sunshine kid. 

Where he went, so too went Steve. But he'd forgotten about Steve; he'd recreated Steve the wrong way. Like Carter, like Stark, he'd let Steve down. The real Steve had played a game where all you had to do was your best. Now, years later, it was a different game. Bucky had let them change the rules. 

Behind him someone gave a yell. Bucky turned. It was Mandel and his wife, scared to find someone strange in their son's room. Bucky froze, scared just because he was scared. He was always scared now, always confused. He moved without thinking about it.

Victor began to scream.

-

"What I don't understand," came Stark's voice, breathing fast, above Bucky somewhere, "Is the  _kid_. Soviet slugs in everybody but the kid. I don't understand it. I-- _my_  weapons--"

"This is what we were trying to avoid. More of this," Carter said softly. Bucky could barely hear her over the horrible kind of clacking noise all around him.

"You found him," Stark said. "Tell us--for god's sake--"

"I don't know what happened," Steve said calmly. "All I know is that the deal's gone through now. You have to put this aside for now--"

"How?" said Stark. "How the  _fuck_  am I supposed to make up for this? Cecilia Mandel Sharon was my wife's  _cousin_ \--"

"And when the spy who did this is caught," Steve told him, "When in two years' time you can turn to her and show her that Stark weapons brought him down in the jungle, holed up in some hellhole after we hunt him down, you don't think she'll be happy? Mark my words: 1971 or so will be a great year for the Starks if she can hold out. But either she knows the risks of the game or she doesn't."

"Violeta," said Peggy Carter, apropos of nothing.

"What?" said Steve.

"What about Violeta?" said Peggy Carter. "Thank god she was out with that boy. If she'd come for breakfast like she was supposed to, she'd be dead, too."  

"Well, she goes back to Chile," said Steve.

"Chile's going to be horrible," said Stark, in a choked kind of way. "We--we'll be working in Chile. There are things we'll have to do."

There was silence.

"She can stay with my brother. He has children. And Gabe does. He and Georgine had three. She could stay with them too if she likes; Georgine won't mind. If Maria will allow it," Peggy Carter said. 

And just like that, above him on the train, accountable to no one, they tidied up the mess.

-

"Why?" Bucky said, when Stark and Carter had gone, when Steve had lifted up the slats of the floor, eased off his muzzle, begun to tinker with his arm.

"That's what I want to ask you," Steve said, a little reproachfully. "I told you to take out the kids. Not give me a bloodbath. Oh--you mean why take out the kids?"

"Mandel might have done what you wanted," Bucky said wildly. "Rigged the election. No communists in Chile."

"Who says that's what I want?" Steve said. "No communists in Chile, no Stark and Carter and spooks deciding to involve themselves in Chile. At least not to the extent we need. They're as predictable as you, you know. They think they don't want to make the  _wrong_  choices. But they will. We don't even have to lead 'em. They do most of our work on their own."

There was a knock at the door to the train compartment. Steve cursed. He forced the muzzle back into Bucky's mouth, fixed the slats over him again. This time he didn't do it quite right. Bucky could see out between a gap in the slats. Steve went to answer the door, looking irritated and someone just out of sight was speaking very rapidly, and Steve said, "I don't care about higher orders. Who thinks they can force a bunch of kids on us at a time like this?"

Then more rapid speech. Steve raised an eyebrow. He started to look more contemplative. Some shuffling. Steve sticking his head out of the doorway. When he pulled it back in he was smiling. Smiling, shining hair, looking perfect, good, entirely good, glorious. 

"So you're the colonel's son," he said, stepping back. "You're the kid who saved Vi Mandel. I don't know if you understand the incredible thing you did this morning, young man." And then Junior came in.

 _Junior, no,_ Bucky thought. _No. Don't trust him. Junior,_ don't. 

"That's me," Junior said. Then, vaguely, "I don't know. I knew some guy was sniffing around her and her brother. You know, a real creep."

He didn't say any more than that. It was like he didn't know any more. This was Junior's talent. Keeping his cards close. Good. Good. He might survive. 

Steve smiled broadly at him. Like he was sizing up the next fall guy. He invited Junior further in. Junior passed right over where Bucky was. Sat down. Tap tap, went his shoes. Steve came and stood over the slats and then Bucky couldn't see any more.

"God, let me see," said Steve. "Where were you guys living when I met you? When I met Nick Fury? Oh. god--" he made a face, gritted his teeth. "--you were in--"

"Chicago," said Junior.

Steve snapped his fingers. "Right," he said, like he had a handle on Junior now. "White Sox, right."

"Right," Junior said, playing the game. "But I'm going to Philly now."

"End of the line," said Steve playfully. He tapped his Italian leather shoes right over Bucky's head. "Our contingent's lucky enough that we'll be getting off in New York. We're not going that far. We're not going that far together."

-

By the time they reached New York the drugs in Bucky's arm had put him almost thoroughly under. He was in a box, and mentally he was simply feeling, not processing; and when he caught a glimpse of something else through a crack it was Steve signing papers for the box to be delivered to Zola's lab, using the name he'd been using this whole time, the fake name.

No. The real name.

Bucky thought of Steve. Of how he might die if he didn't have Steve, how he'd taken Steve with him everywhere. This was the cruelest thing he could have done. He'd ruined him. He'd ruined him. He'd thought the worst thing was Steve dead, but it wasn't. The worst thing was Steve warped the way the whole country was warped, the way it had always been a little warped, maybe. 

He had to forget Steve.

Maybe he would die from it. He hoped he would. Because maybe this was what Zola and the new Steve wanted from him anyway; maybe he would be even more use to them if he didn't have Steve. But he didn't want to remember anymore. How could he keep Steve with him, after everything he'd done? How could he do that to Steve? If Steve were here he'd never be able to face him; in fact, when he met Steve again, he hoped Steve wouldn't know him at all. He hoped Steve would look away. So he wouldn't have to know about the new Bucky, the warped Bucky, the menace.

"Here and here?" Steve asked the courier. And he wrote: October 6, 1969. Alexander Pierce.

-

He had to forget Steve. It wasn't that Steve wasn't worth remembering. It was that he wasn't worthy to remember him. Not anymore. 

-

When Shoeless Joe Jackson moved back to South Carolina he opened a liquor store, and one day an old teammate walked in. Shoeless Joe didn't seem to recognize him. 

"Don't you know me, Joe?" he said.

"Sure," said Joe. "But I wasn't sure you'd want to know me. Most of them don't."

**Author's Note:**

> I should have spent longer on this but I am tired of going over it, so here it is.
> 
> Nick Fury is maybe 3 years younger than Samuel L. Jackson in this fic. The museum at Cooperstown is amazing. I pushed up some of the controversy surrounding the (non) inclusion of the Negro League to make it fit into 1969, which is when CCR's Fortunate Son came out, and so did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Robert Redford. This fic contains a mountain of references to E.L. Doctorow's Loon Lake,** which is my least favorite book of his but which always makes me think of upstate New York. 
> 
> weirywolf illustrated this fic [here](http://greyhound-underground.tumblr.com/post/110630451878/it-aint-me-screamed-the-radio-it-aint-me-it), and it is perfect. Click for art that is a great improvement on the fic itself.
> 
> The story about Shoeless Joe is true.
> 
> **adjusting this after a Doctorow re-reading spree. The Morita development is way more Homer & Langley than Loon Lake. The descriptions of Steve and of the area, though, are definitely from Loon Lake. Loon Lake remains my least favorite Doctorow book, but Homer & Langley is much better than I remember.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Shoeless Joe and the Sunshine Kid | written by nimmieamee](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13320231) by [Tipsy_Kitty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tipsy_Kitty/pseuds/Tipsy_Kitty)




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